Infrared Colors of Small Serendipitously-Found Asteroids in the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey

Bibliographic Details
Title: Infrared Colors of Small Serendipitously-Found Asteroids in the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey
Authors: Morrison, Samantha G., Strauss, Ryder H., Trilling, David E., López-Oquendo, Andy J., Bruursema, Justice, Vrba, Frederick J.
Publication Year: 2024
Collection: Astrophysics
Subject Terms: Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
More Details: The UKIRT Hemisphere Survey covers the northern sky in the infrared from 0-60 degrees declination. Current data releases include both J and K bands, with H-band data forthcoming. Here we present a novel pipeline to recover asteroids from this survey data. We recover 26,138 reliable observations, corresponding to 23,399 unique asteroids, from these public data. We measure J-K colors for 601 asteroids. Our survey extends about two magnitudes deeper than 2MASS. We find that our small inner main belt objects are less red than larger inner belt objects, perhaps because smaller asteroids are collisionally younger, with surfaces that have been less affected by space weathering. In the middle and outer main belt, we find our small asteroids to be redder than larger objects in their same orbits, possibly due to observational bias or a disproportionate population of very red objects among these smaller asteroids. Future work on this project includes extracting moving object measurements from H and Y band data when it becomes available.
Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17613
Accession Number: edsarx.2407.17613
Database: arXiv
More Details
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