The Short Rotation Period of Nereid

Details The Short Rotation Period of Nereid The Short Rotation Period of Nereid

2003-05-30

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0306001v1

Astrophys.J. 591 (2003) L71-L74

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Accepted by ApJ Letters, 11 pages (incl. 1 figure)

Scientific paper

10.1086/377067

We determine the period, p = 11.52 \pm 0.14 h, and a light curve peak-to-peak amplitude, a = 0.029 \pm 0.003 magnitudes, of the Neptunian irregular satellite Nereid. If the light curve variation is due to albedo variations across the surface, rather than solely to the shape of Nereid variations, the rotation period would be a factor of two shorter. In either case, such a rotation period and light curve amplitude, together with Nereid's orbital period, p=360.14 days, imply that Nereid is almost certainly in a regular rotation state, rather than the chaotic rotation state suggested by Schaefer and Schaefer (1988,2000) and Dobrovolskis (1995). Assuming that Nereid is perfectly spherical, the albedo variation is 3% across the observed surface. Assuming a uniform geometric albedo, the observed cross sectional area varies by 3%. We caution that the lightcurve found in this paper only sets limits on the combination of albedo and physical irregularity and that we cannot determine the orientation of Nereid's spin axis from our data.

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