It was discovered on 10 February 1907, by astronomer August Kopff at Heidelberg Observatory in southwest Germany, and named after the Trojan prince Hector, from Greek mythology.

It is thought that Hektor might be a contact binary (two asteroids joined by gravitational attraction) like 216 Kleopatra, composed of two more rounded lobes of 220 and 183 km mean diameters.

[7] Hubble Space Telescope observations of Hektor in 1993 did not show an obvious bilobate shape because of a limited angular resolution.

On 17 July 2006, the Keck 10-meter-II-telescope and its laser guide star adaptive optics (AO) system indicated a bilobate shape for Hektor,[13] which was reinforced by later studies that, together with multiple historical lightcurves, suggest a rotation period of 6.9205 hours.

This mostly arises from large differences in estimated albedo (approximately 0.107 for NEOWISE, and a much lower 0.034 for AKARI) rather than its absolute magnitude being measured only briefly at opposing extremes of a widely varying cycle such as thought to account for the uncertainty over the size of 1173 Anchises (624 Hektor's own abs.