Do The Phase Curves Of KBOs Present Any Correlation With Their Physical And Orbital Parameters ?

Details Do The Phase Curves Of KBOs Present Any Correlation With Their Physical And Orbital Parameters ? Do The Phase Curves Of KBOs Present Any Correlation With Their Physical And Orbital Parameters ?

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.4408r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #44.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.565

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Scientific paper

It is known for a long time that the brightness of planetary surfaces significantly changes with phase angle (angle Sun-Target-Earth). These functions present typically a significant increase of the brightness when phase angle approaches zero, which is called an opposition effect. This effect plays a dominant role in magnitude-phase curves of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) since they can be observed only at small phase angles. Their study can provide important constraints on physical properties of the upper surface layer of KBOs.
We have used already published data (either as phase curves or as photometric data), as well as our own observational data, to get information on the phase curves for 18 Transneptunian Objects (including Pluto and Charon) or Centaurs. This work has been simplified by the use of the Besançon photometric database for Kuiper-Belt Objects and Centaurs (www.obs-besancon.fr/bdp) and is still a work in progress with other observations planned in the future. The steepness of the phase function curves was compared for the different targets in the same phase angle range (0.5-1.5 deg).
The first results that we have obtained with this preliminary study are:
(i)The existence of a correlation between albedo and the phase curve slope. The steeper this slope is the smaller the albedo of the object. This implies that the shadow-hiding effect dominates in the considered phase angle range.
(ii)The search for other possible correlations between phase curve slopes and orbital and physical parameters is not conclusive, except, may be, for the Centaurs and the B-R color index.

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