[1] Cole is a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.

The protagonist, reminiscent of Oliver Twist, is an amateur astronomer in a dystopian society where boys receive numbers instead of names.

[11] In the Moving Object Catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Cole has a spectral type is closest to an L-type asteroid followed by the common, stony S-type.

[7] In September 2004, two rotational lightcurves of Cole were obtained from photometric observations by Donald Pray, Silvano Casulli, René Roy.

[8][9] According to the survey carried out by the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Cole measures between 3.51 and 4.263 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo between 0.29 and 0.294,[4][5][6] while the Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes a standard albedo for a stony asteroids of 0.20, and calculates a diameter of 4.71 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 14.0.