TY - JOUR
T1 - Surface Properties of Near-Sun Asteroids
AU - Holt, Carrie E.
AU - Knight, Matthew M.
AU - Kelley, Michael S. P.
AU - Ye, Quanzhi
AU - Hsieh, Henry H.
AU - Snodgrass, Colin
AU - Fitzsimmons, Alan
AU - Richardson, Derek C.
AU - Sunshine, Jessica M.
AU - Eisner, Nora L.
AU - Gustaffson, Annika
N1 - 22 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in PSJ
Funding Information:
Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS website is http://www.sdss.org/.
Funding Information:
We thank the anonymous referees for their thoughtful review. C.H. would like to thank Mikael Granvik and Robert Jedicke for assistance in generating source regions for our sample, Richard Binzel for thoughtful ideas, and Anathasia Toliou for assistance interpreting the dwell times results. C.H., M.M.K., M.S.K., and Q. Y. are supported by NASA Near Earth Object Observations grant NNX17AK15G. We thank Lori Feaga, Tony Farnham, and Nick Moskovitz for assisting with some observations and Brian Skiff and Larry Wasserman for their assistance in scheduling observations using Lowell Observatory’s 31-inch telescope.
Funding Information:
The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, the Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Funding Information:
These results made use of the Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory. Lowell is a private, nonprofit institution dedicated to astrophysical research and public appreciation of astronomy and operates the LDT in partnership with Boston University, the University of Maryland, the University of Toledo, Northern Arizona University, and Yale University. The Large Monolithic Imager was built by Lowell Observatory using funds provided by the National Science Foundation (AST-1005313).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2022/8/9
Y1 - 2022/8/9
N2 - Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with small perihelion distances reach sub-solar temperatures of > 1000 K. They are hypothesized to undergo "super-catastrophic" disruption, potentially caused by near-Sun processes such as thermal cracking, spin-up, meteoroid impacts, and subsurface volatile release; all of which are likely to cause surface alteration, which may change the spectral slope of the surface. We attempted to observe 35 of the 53 known near-Sun asteroids with q < 0.15 au from January 2017 to March 2020 to search for trends related to near-Sun processes. We report the optical colors and spectral slopes of 22 objects that we successfully observed and the measured rotation periods for three objects. We find the distribution of colors to be overall bluer than the color distribution of NEAs, though there is large overlap. We attribute large scatter to unknown dynamical histories and compositions for individual objects, as well as competing surface altering processes. We also investigated potential correlations between colors and other properties (e.g., perihelion distance, Tisserand parameter, rotation period), and searched for evidence of activity. Finally, we have compiled all known physical and dynamical properties of these objects, including probabilistic source regions and dwell times with q < 0.15 au.
AB - Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with small perihelion distances reach sub-solar temperatures of > 1000 K. They are hypothesized to undergo "super-catastrophic" disruption, potentially caused by near-Sun processes such as thermal cracking, spin-up, meteoroid impacts, and subsurface volatile release; all of which are likely to cause surface alteration, which may change the spectral slope of the surface. We attempted to observe 35 of the 53 known near-Sun asteroids with q < 0.15 au from January 2017 to March 2020 to search for trends related to near-Sun processes. We report the optical colors and spectral slopes of 22 objects that we successfully observed and the measured rotation periods for three objects. We find the distribution of colors to be overall bluer than the color distribution of NEAs, though there is large overlap. We attribute large scatter to unknown dynamical histories and compositions for individual objects, as well as competing surface altering processes. We also investigated potential correlations between colors and other properties (e.g., perihelion distance, Tisserand parameter, rotation period), and searched for evidence of activity. Finally, we have compiled all known physical and dynamical properties of these objects, including probabilistic source regions and dwell times with q < 0.15 au.
KW - astro-ph.EP
U2 - 10.3847/PSJ/ac77f6
DO - 10.3847/PSJ/ac77f6
M3 - Article
SN - 2632-3338
VL - 3
SP - 1
EP - 17
JO - The Planetary Science Journal
JF - The Planetary Science Journal
IS - 8
M1 - 187
ER -