Search For Satellites Around Asteroids With Coronagraphic High-contrast Imaging On Adaptive Optics

Details Search For Satellites Around Asteroids With Coronagraphic High-contrast Imaging On Adaptive Optics Search For Satellites Around Asteroids With Coronagraphic High-contrast Imaging On Adaptive Optics

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.3930l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #39.30; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1038

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

High-contrast, coronagraphic imaging with adaptive optics (AO) is a powerful technique for directly detecting exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. We explore the capability of an advanced hardware configuration at the Palomar Hale Telescope to search for satellites around solar system asteroids . Seventeen asteroids, including Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta were observed on April 25 and 26, 2010 in the Ks and J-bands. For each target, we use a 0.41" (0.91" for Ceres) diameter occulting disk to block the light from the primary body. We also observed a nearby calibration star to facilitate point-spread-function (PSF) subtraction. Since asteroids are spatially resolved, additional processing is required compared to stars, which are generally point sources. By subtracting a PSF reference convolved with asteroid disk, we were able to reduce the intensity of speckle noise around the primary body by a factor of 7-10 compared to standard coronagraphy, reaching 5-sigma contrast ratios better than 1e-4 at separations greater than 1" from the center of occulting disk for the best cases. Although our preliminary analysis did not reveal any satellite detections around any of the asteroids, we were able to place strong upper-limits on the size of companions to Ceres of 1 km at 3 Ceres radii, assuming a Ceres-like albedo. Pallas and Vesta have similar detection limits. The results demonstrate that high-contrast imaging techniques widely used on point sources for exoplanet imaging can be effectively adapted to search for km to sub-km sized satellites within 10 radii of large main belt asteroids.

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