IRAC Reflectances of Hot Classical KBOs and Scattered Disk Objects

Details IRAC Reflectances of Hot Classical KBOs and Scattered Disk Objects IRAC Reflectances of Hot Classical KBOs and Scattered Disk Objects

Jun 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010sptz.prop70115e&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #70115

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Scientific paper

We propose to measure reflected fluxes of 22 (dynamically) hot classical Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and 19 scattered disk objects to determine surface compositions. The small bodies of the outer Solar System provide probes of the statistical conditions, history, and interactions in the Solar System. We focus in this proposal on two groups in order to extend our previous observations to address the origin of the hot vs. cold classical populations, the source and fate of Centaurs, and the overall spectral diversity among KBOs. Hot classical KBOs reside in the classical Kuiper Belt, between ~40 and 48 AU, but have high inclinations (>5 or 10 deg), in contrast to their dynamically cold (low inclination) counterparts, which likely formed in (or very near) their current locations. Some dynamical models predict source regions entirely exclusive of the cold classical source region, while others predict that that there should be samples of cold classical material within the hot classical population. The ultra-red material that dominates the cold classical surfaces has been widely hypothesized to come from irradiation of CH4-rich surfaces over 4.5 Gyr, which we see as a strong absorption in channel 1 in our cycle-6 data. We will test scenarios for the origin of hot classical objects by searching for this strong absorption at 3.6 microns and further characterizing composition with the 4.5 micron channel. The scattered disk is hypothesized to be the immediate source of Centaurs. Since the dynamical pathway into the Centaur region is reversible, the scattered disk would also be populated by ex-Centaurs ? objects that have previously gone through a phase of low heliocentric distance. We will test this hypothesis by searching for compositional analogs of the two classes of Centaurs. This proposal directly builds on the success of previous Spitzer observations that have characterized a small sampling of the KBO diversity and obtained a deeper view of two related populations (cold classical KBOs and Centaurs).

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