Short-term Variability of Transneptunian Objects and Centaurs

Details Short-term Variability of Transneptunian Objects and Centaurs Short-term Variability of Transneptunian Objects and Centaurs

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.4713t&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #47.13

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Even though there are more than 1300 Transneptunian Objects discovered so far, less than 5% of them have a well determined rotational period. We compile the results of 6 years of observations from our Kuiper Belt lightcurve survey in Spain. Our main aim was to increase the number of objects whose short-term variability has been studied in order to be able to make general inferences on the Kuiper Belt and trying to avoid some biases. We present a homogeneous data set of rotation periods and amplitudes for 29 Kuiper Belt
Objects reduced and analyzed with the same tools. One of the results is that the photometric variability of our sample is smaller than previously thought. In fact, only 15% of our sample has a larger variability than 0.15mag. This result can be explained if most of the TNOs are Mclaurin spheroids with little large-scale surface features. We note an apparent trend for faster spinning objects towards smaller sizes, which would be consistent with the fact that the smaller objects are more collisionally evolved and would likely spin faster. We also observe that the smaller the objects the larger their amplitude, which also seems consistent with a collisional evolution scenario. Maxwellian fits to our spin frequency distribution give a mean period for the TNOs of 7.11h, which is smaller than previous expectations. The apparent spin barrier we observe around 4h indicates a lower limit of 0.71g/cm3 to the density of these bodies. More detailed models that can explain the lightcurve database gathered from the literature plus our own results require densities in the 1.1 to 1.3g/cm3 range. Model that reproduce the observations imply that hydrostatic equilibrium is likely met by the TNOs in the size range from H=-1 to 7 and thus most of them might qualify to be dwarf planets.

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