English

Asteroids' Size Distribution and Colors from HiTS

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-03-16 v2

Abstract

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 gg' and rr'. 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 grg'-r' color-size correlation for 14<Hg<1814<H_{g'}<18 (1<D<101<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\sim0.9, steeper than in any other survey, while data from HiTS 2014's campaign is consistent with previous ones (slopes 0.68\sim0.68 at the bright end and 0.34\sim0.34 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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.05499,
  title  = {Asteroids' Size Distribution and Colors from HiTS},
  author = {J. Peña and C. Fuentes and F. Förster and J. Martínez-Palomera and G. Cabrera-Vives and J. C. Maureira and P. Huijse and P. A. Estévez and L. Galbany and S. González-Gaitán and Th. de Jaeger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.05499},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 18 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:12:06.558Z