Related papers: Asteroid Distributions in the Ecliptic
This study examines the rotational characteristics of asteroids through statistical modeling of the diameter-period relationship. A statistical evaluation of the diameter-period relationship was conducted using a dataset of 34,326…
Superfast rotators (SFRs) are small solar system objects that rotate faster than generally possible for a cohesionless rubble pile. Their rotational characteristics allow us to make inferences about their interior structure and composition.…
While proper orbital elements are currently available for more than 1 million asteroids, taxonomical information is still lagging behind. Surveys like SDSS-MOC4 provided preliminary information for more than 100,000 objects, but many…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
We probed the surface environment of large ($>$80 km in diameter) T-type asteroids, a taxonomic type relatively ill-constrained as an independent group, and discussed their place of origin. We performed spectroscopic observations of two…
A stable population of objects co-orbiting with Venus was recently hypothesized in order to explain the existence of Venus's co-orbital dust ring. We conducted a 5 day twilight survey for these objects with the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American…
We studied 93 asteroid pairs. We estimated times elapsed since separation of pair members that are between 7*10^3 and a few 10^6 yr. We derived the rotation periods for all the primaries and a sample of secondaries. We derived the absolute…
The seven known main belt comets (MBCs) have orbital characteristics of main belt asteroids yet exhibit dust ejection like comets. In order to constrain their physical and orbital properties we searched the Thousand Asteroid Light Curve…
Echelle spectra of 10 bright asteroids are presented and compared against an observed twilight spectrum and a computed Solar spectrum. Spectra covering a 2130 A spectral range centered on 5785 A are of high resolving power and high signal…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
The main belt, the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is home to more than 1 million asteroids. These asteroids form orbital groups, (i.e., asteroid families formed by collisions) and also spectral groups (taxonomies) with…
From 1996 to 2015 sixteen main belt asteroids were discovered exhibiting cometary activity (less than one per year), all of them during searches at the telescope. In this work we will explore another way to discover them. We reduced 192016…
The population of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) shows a large variety of objects in terms of physical and dynamical properties. They are subject to planetary encounters and to strong solar wind and radiation effects. Their study is also…
Determining the size and orbital distribution of the population of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is the focus of intense research, with the most recent models converging to a population of approximately $1000$ NEAs larger than 1 km and up to…
We investigated the size distribution of high-inclination main-belt asteroids (MBAs) to explore asteroid collisional evolution under hypervelocity collisions of around 10 km/s. We performed a wide-field survey for high-inclination sub-km…
The larger number of models of asteroid shapes and their rotational states derived by the lightcurve inversion give us better insight into both the nature of individual objects and the whole asteroid population. With a larger statistical…
We fit 54,296 sparsely-sampled asteroid lightcurves in the Palomar Transient Factory to a combined rotation plus phase-function model. Each lightcurve consists of 20+ observations acquired in a single opposition. Using 805 asteroids in our…
Asteroid discoveries are essential for planetary-defense efforts aiming to prevent impacts with Earth, including the more frequent megaton explosions from decameter impactors. While large asteroids ($\geq$100 km) have remained in the main…
We developed two different point spread function (PSF) analysis techniques for discovering wide separation binary asteroids in wide field surveys. We then applied these techniques to images of main belt asteroids in the 4 to 60 km size…
We present the results of our Thousand Asteroid Light Curve Survey (TALCS) conducted with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in September 2006. Our untargeted survey detected 828 Main Belt asteroids to a limiting magnitude of g'~22.5…