Search for Satellites around Ceres

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The discovery of a satellite orbiting an asteroid is important in helping to determine the density of the primary body. This lends clues to the asteroid’s composition as well as allows the asteroid to be placed in a taxonomy group. We conducted a satellite search around Ceres using HST images from 2004 and ground-based, Palomar images from 2006. In our initial search, no candidate objects were found in the Hill Sphere around Ceres. The detection limit for satellites was determined by placing fake objects with random number, position, and magnitudes in each image. The artificial images were then searched for objects in the same manner as the original images. If we assume that a satellite would have the same albedo as Ceres, we can say that it is likely (at the 90% detection limit) that there are no objects larger than 1 km in diameter orbiting Ceres in the HST images out to a distance of 15,000 km. Similar analysis is currently being done on the Palomar data, and at this meeting we will report our results of the satellite detection limits covering the entire Hill Sphere.

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