A Search for Vulcanoids Using STEREO Heliospheric Imager Data

Details A Search for Vulcanoids Using STEREO Heliospheric Imager Data A Search for Vulcanoids Using STEREO Heliospheric Imager Data

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.4301s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #43.01

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Over the past 20 years, our understanding of the solar system has grown dramatically, as a series of heretofore wholly or largely undetected populations of small bodies have been revealed in increasing detail. Among the few stable dynamical niches that remain relatively unexplored is the region interior to Mercury's orbit (specifically, orbits with semi-major axes between 0.07 and 0.21 AU), where a population of small, asteroid-like bodies called Vulcanoids is hypothesized to reside. We present the initial results from our campaign to use images from the Heliospheric Imagers aboard NASA's two STEREO spacecraft to conduct the most constraining search yet performed for Vulcanoids. In terms of photometric depth times the area covered, our campaign is over two orders of magnitude better than the previous best search. We are able to detect main-belt asteroids as faint as V=13.5 as they appear to transit through the Vulcanoid region. We have not yet detected any candidate Vulcanoids, although our search is still ongoing. We conservatively estimate the limiting magnitude of our search to be approximately V=13, meaning our search will be complete for Vulcanoids as small as 6.4 km in diameter at 0.21 AU and 2.2 km at 0.07 AU. At these limits, even the non-detection of any Vulcanoids will place new constraints on the formation and subsequent collisional and dynamical evolution of objects in the deep inner solar system.

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