Teller is asteroid #5006 and also known as 1989 GL₅. Teller measures thirteen kilometers in diameter. Teller’s orbit is characterized by a semi-major axis of 3.18 Astronomical Units, an eccentricity of 0.07, a period of revolution of 2 075 days, and an inclination of 7.6 degrees. Teller was discovered by Eleanor Francis (or Kay) “Glo” Helin (née Francis) at the Palomar Observatory.

Teller is named after Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born American physicist, who became known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. He however always hated and rejected this nickname. The name he used in German was Eduard Teller and his original Hungarian name was Teller Ede. 1989 GL₅ got the name Teller in 1992 at the occasion of Edward Teller’s eighty-fourth birthday. According to the official naming citation, for the Gamow-Teller relationship. This describes a beta decay transition with conservation of the vector current. Edward Teller was born in 1908 and passed away in 2003. He was born in Austria-Hungary in a family of assimilated Jews. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a pianist. She allegedly wanted that her son, too, became a pianist. Edward Teller’s colleagues had often complained about Edward Teller disturbing everybody by playing piano all night long. Edward Teller himself wanted to become a mathematician. But his father prohibited both. He forced Ede to study chemical engineering. After two years of study, Teller Ede was able to get his father’s consent to change the study subject to physics, where quantum mechanics just came up. The father gave his consent only after personally talking to all the professors at Karlsruhe University. Eduard Teller had studied first in Budapest, then in Karlsruhe, after that in Munich, and finally in Leipzig. When he studied in Munich, he once, while exiting a tram, somehow got his foot under the tram. His foot had to be amputated. Edward Teller wore a prosthesis and limped for the rest of his life. He however had nevertheless made friends with the surgeon, who removed his foot. Because he was Hungarian, Hitler’s removal of Jews from universities didn’t include him, but he thus already in 1933 got warned and found it wiser to leave Germany. He went to England, joining the group of the chemist Frederick George Donnan, then to Denmark, where he assisted Niels Bohr, and in 1934 briefly returned to Hungary, where he married Augusta Maria “Mici” Harkanyi, the sister of a schoolmate. Edward Teller and his wife in 1935 emigrated into the USA, where they in 1941 were naturalized and later got their two children Paul and Susan Wendy.

Edward Teller in the USA had been a professor of physics at George Washington University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California. Edward Teller then worked at the secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. His son was born in Chicago Illinois and his daughter was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Why is the famous Los Alamos unknown to WordPress’ spell-check?) Edward Teller wanted a fusion bomb, so refused to do his share of work for the fission bomb. More physicists and mathematicians hence had to be employed. Among them Klaus Fuchs, who later turned out to be a Soviet spy. Edward Teller made many enemies among his colleagues and this not only due to playing piano at night or refusing to do his share of work. After the Second World War, most of the physicists, who were involved in the development of the atomic bomb, advocated for nuclear disarmament. This caused Edward Teller to more vehemently advocate for nuclear arms buildup and the development of a fusion bomb, especially after the Soviets in 1949 tested a fusion bomb. This in 1952 led to the founding of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where new people got employed because of the strife, which Edward Teller had with his colleagues in Los Alamos. A hydrogen fusion bomb of the so-called Teller-Ulam design got tested already in 1952. Edward Teller wasn’t present because he didn’t feel welcome. He as soon as new people got employed, made new enemies also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He in 1954 in an interview called Robert Oppenheimer a security risk, which led to more strife with his colleagues and to the withdrawal of Robert Oppenheimer’s security classification.

Edward Teller also advocated for the civilian use of nuclear energy and in another interview accused Jane Fonda, who after the Three-Mile-Island incident advocated against the use of nuclear energy, to have caused him a heart attack. He suggested to explode fusion bombs to the purpose to construct a deep water port in Alaska this way. He during twenty years was an advisor of the Israeli government’s nuclear weapons program. He supported the idea of a man-made climate change and proposed as a solution that nuclear power plants replace fossil energy.

The family-name Teller has no other etymology than being a German word. As such Teller means plate. As origin of this family-name, a plate manufacturer is presumed.

So the asteroid Teller presides over plates and represents persons named Teller. The asteroid #5006 furthermore represents fusion energy and nuclear bombs. The asteroid #5006 also is a malefic, that indicates seeking strife and presides over blaming other people and over noise at night. Limping is represented by asteroid #2212 (Hephaistos), so for this theme would rather be interesting what role asteroid #2212 plays in the astrological charts related to Edward Teller. But this is a different topic.