Asteroids’ Size Distribution and Colors from HiTS
J. Peña (1,2), C. Fuentes (1,2), F. Förster (3,2), J. Martínez-Palomer (4,1,3), G. Cabrera-Vives (5,2), J.C. Maureira (3), P. Huijse (6, 2), P.A. Estévez (7,2), L. Galbany (8), S. González-Gaitán (9, 3, 2), Th. de Jaeger (4, 1, 2) ((1) Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile, (2) Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Chile., (3) Center for Mathematical Modeling, Santiago, Chile, (4) Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA., (5) Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Concepción, Chile, (6) Informatics Institute, Universidad Austral de Chile, Chile, (7) Electrical Engineering Department, University of Chile, Chile, (8) Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain, (9) CENTRA, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
(Submitted on 11 Mar 2020)
We report the observations of solar system objects during the 2015 campaign of the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS). We found 5740 bodies (mostly Main Belt asteroids), 1203 of which were detected in different nights and in g′ and r′. Objects were linked in the barycenter system and their orbital parameters were computed assuming Keplerian motion. We identified 6 near Earth objects, 1738 Main Belt asteroids and 4 Trans-Neptunian objects. We did not find a g′−r′ color–size correlation for 14< Hg′< 18 (1< D<10 km) asteroids. We show asteroids' colors are disturbed by HiTS' 1.6 hour cadence and estimate that observations should be separated by at most 14 minutes to avoid confusion in future wide-field surveys like LSST. The size distribution for the Main Belt objects can be characterized as a simple power law with slope ∼0.9, steeper than in any other survey, while data from HiTS 2014's campaign is consistent with previous ones (slopes ∼0.68 at the bright end and ∼0.34 at the faint end). This difference is likely due to the ecliptic distribution of the Main Belt since 2015's campaign surveyed farther from the ecliptic than did 2014's and most previous surveys.
Comments: 17 pages, 18 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Journal reference: The Astronomical Journal, Volume 159, Number 4, Page 148, Year 2020
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab7338
Cite as: arXiv:2003.05499 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2003.05499v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: José Peña Zamudio
[v1] Wed, 11 Mar 2020 19:29:12 UTC (1,670 KB)