Preliminary Search for Spectro-Dynamical Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Recent spectroscopic studies of asteroid families have revealed the trend for members of each dynamical family to be spectrally similar. This apparent spectral homogeneity between family members provides the opportunity to search for asteroid groupings based on similarities in both proper orbital elements and spectral reflectance characteristics. The first search for spectro-dynamical asteroid families utilized over 2000 visible-wavelength spectra obtained during both phases of the Small Main-belt Asteroid Spectroscopic Survey (SMASS, Xu et al. 1995, Bus and Binzel 2002), and the Small Solar System Object Spectroscopic Survey (S3OS2, Lazzaro et al. 2004). This work has led to the identification of approximately 40 families, some of which had not been identified in previous clustering efforts based solely on orbital elements. We now ask if this approach can be applied to larger asteroid data sets consisting of broad-band colors, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Moving Object Catalog. The five bandpasses making up the Sloan filter set provide considerably less information than the higher-resolution asteroid spectra, but they do sample important regions in the asteroid spectrum associated with asteroid classification. An initial study based on the SDSS colors (Ivezic et al. 2002) showed that these data confirm the existence of spectral similarities within many of the known dynamical asteroid families. We therefore ask if the taxonomic "resolution" of the SDSS broad-band data (the ability to divide the parameterized color space into meaningful, classifiable sub-regions) is sufficient to allow new searches for spectro-dynamical asteroid groupings. In this preliminary study, we look at the variation and uncertainties in SDSS colors observed within the known spectro-dynamical families to assess their value for more detailed studies, and discuss ways in which these data might be combined with orbital elements to search for new families.

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