Potential Biases In Future Asteroid Lightcurve Surveys

Details Potential Biases In Future Asteroid Lightcurve Surveys Potential Biases In Future Asteroid Lightcurve Surveys

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.4609w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #46.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1051

Statistics

2

Scientific paper

A goal of recent and upcoming surveys is securing a large number of asteroid rotation periods via lightcurves. While a worthwhile effort, the "shotgun” approach being applied in many cases may not add significant new information about rotation rates and be biased against critical types of objects: fast/slow rotators, binary and multiple asteroids, and tumblers. We examined different observing strategies to determine the success rate for finding the correct period and how they might be biased against critical objects by generating 11,000 synthetic lightcurves combined into 2,500 composite curves covering a range of periods from 0.3 to 400 hours and amplitudes from 0.1 to 2.0 magnitudes and included random noise. These lightcurves were "sampled” to approximate existing and planned strategies. As with studies by Mann et al. and Masiero et al., we found a high success rate with lightcurves of relatively short periods and moderate to high amplitudes - P ≤ 8 h, A ≥ 0.3 mag - especially if "success” included finding a period that was 0.5x or 2.0x the true period. On the other hand, many lightcurves of low amplitude and long period - P ≥ 24 h, A ≤ 0.1 mag - were initially found to have periods of P ≤ 1 h which, if adopted, would badly skew rotational statistics. Overall, we found that relying on minimum of data, even if obtained over one more weeks, did not produce a significant percentage of statistically useful periods and there was a strong potential for biases against critical types of objects. A better method to advance our understanding of rotation rate and evolution and the underlying causes appears to be to concentrate on a more limited number of objects and follow each one until a reasonable solution is found.

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