The rotation period and shape of the hyperbolic asteroid A/2017 U1 from its lightcurve

Matthew M. Knight, Silvia Protopapa, Michael S.P. Kelley, Tony L. Farnham, James M. Bauer, Dennis Bodewits, Lori M. Feaga, Jessica M. Sunshine
(Submitted on 4 Nov 2017)

We observed the newly discovered hyperbolic minor planet A/2017 U1 on 2017 October 30 with the 4.3-m Discovery Channel Telescope. From these observations, we derived a partial lightcurve with variability of at least 1.2 mag. This lightcurve segment rules out rotation periods less than 3 hr and suggests the period is at least 5 hr. On the assumption that the variability is due to a changing cross section, the axial ratio is at least 3:1. We saw no evidence for a coma or tail in either individual images or in a stacked image having an equivalent exposure time of 9000 s, and set a limit to any coma present at less than ~30 mag arcsec^-2.

Comments:    Submitted to ApJL; 5 pages of text, 2 figures
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1711.01402 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1711.01402v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Matthew Knight
[v1] Sat, 4 Nov 2017 06:27:57 GMT (482kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01402