88 Thisbe is one of the largest main-belt asteroid

Asteroid

Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

s. It was discovered by C. H. F. Peters

Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters

Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters was a German-American astronomer, and one of the first to discover asteroids....

 on June 15, 1866, and named after Thisbe, heroine of a Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 fable

Fable

A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...

. An occultation of a star

Star

A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

 by Thisbe was observed on October 7, 1981. Results from the occultation indicate a larger than expected diameter of 232 km.

Perturbation

Thisbe has been perturbed

Perturbation (astronomy)

Perturbation is a term used in astronomy in connection with descriptions of the complex motion of a massive body which is subject to appreciable gravitational effects from more than one other massive body....

 by asteroid 7 Iris

7 Iris

7 Iris is a large main-belt asteroid. Among the S-type asteroids, it ranks fifth in geometric mean diameter after Eunomia, Juno, Amphitrite and Herculina....

 and in 2001 Michalak estimated it to have a mass of 1.5 kg. But Iris is strongly perturbed by many minor planets such as 10 Hygiea

10 Hygiea

10 Hygiea is an asteroid located in the asteroid belt. With somewhat oblong diameters of 350–500 km, and a mass estimated to be 2.9% of the total mass of the belt, it is the fourth largest asteroid by volume and mass...

 and 15 Eunomia

15 Eunomia

15 Eunomia is a very large asteroid in the inner asteroid belt. It is the largest of the stony asteroids, and somewhere between the 8th-to-12th-largest main-belt asteroid overall...

.

In 2008, Baer estimated Thisbe to have a mass of 1.05 kg.