Chiron was discovered on 1 November 1977 by Charles Kowal at Palomar Observatory, on an unstable orbit between Saturn and Uranus. It was initially catalogued as an asteroid, then found to develop a coma and was also given a cometary designation, and it is now recognised as the first known member of the centaurs, a class of icy bodies on chaotic, planet-crossing orbits between Jupiter and Neptune that are understood to be escaped Kuiper belt objects on their way to becoming short-period comets. Its orbit is not stable over long periods. Its period is about fifty years, but the eccentricity is such that it moves very unevenly through the zodiac, spending only about a year and a half in Libra and nearly nine years in Aries.
Kowal's own account of the discovery credits a systematic photographic survey of the outer solar system conducted at Palomar specifically to search for exactly this kind of object, rather than a chance find, and the name Chiron was chosen following the established convention, used since the first asteroid discoveries in the early nineteenth century, of drawing on Greco-Roman mythology; centaur-class bodies discovered since have continued the naming theme, giving the class as a whole, Pholus, Nessus, Chariklo and others, a shared mythological vocabulary distinct from the goddess names given to the earlier main-belt asteroids.