Solar System Objects Observed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Commissioning Data

By Željko Ivezic´, S. Tabachnik, R. Rafikov, Robert Lupton, T. Quinn, M. Hammergren, Laurent Eyer, J. Chu, J. Armstrong, Xiaohui Fan and 22 more. 2001

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss measurements of the properties of ∼13,000 asteroids detected in 500 deg2 of sky in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) commissioning data. The moving objects are detected in the magnitude range 14 < r* < 21.5, with a baseline of ∼5 minutes, resulting in typical velocity errors of ∼3%. Extensive tests show that the sample is at least 98% complete, with a contamination rate of less than 3%. We find that the size distribution of asteroids resembles a broken power law, independent of the heliocentric distance: D-2.3 for 0.4 km ≲ D ≲ 5 km, and D-4 for 5 km ≲ D ≲ 40 km. As a consequence of this break, the number of asteroids with r* < 21.5 is 10 times smaller than predicted by extrapolating the power-law relation observed for brighter asteroids (r* ≲ 18). The observed counts imply that there are about 670,000 objects with D > 1 km in the asteroid belt, or up to 3 times less than previous estimates. The revised best estimate for the impact rate of the so-called "killer" asteroids (D > 1 km) is about 1 every 500,000 yr, uncertain to within a factor of 2. We predict that by its completion SDSS will obtain about 100,000 near simultaneous five-band measurements for a subset drawn from 340,000 asteroids brighter than r* < 21.5 at opposition. Only about a third of these asteroids have been previously observed, and usually in just one band. The distribution of main-belt asteroids in the four-dimensional SDSS color space is bimodal, and the two groups can be associated with S- (rocky) and C- (carbonaceous) type asteroids. A strong bimodality is also seen in the heliocentric distribution of asteroids: the inner belt is dominated by S-type asteroids centered at R ∼ 2.8 AU, while C-type asteroids, centered at R ∼ 3.2 AU, dominate the outer belt. The median color of each class becomes bluer by about 0.03 mag AU-1 as the heliocentric distance increases. The observed number ratio of S and C asteroids in a sample with r* < 21.5 is 1.5 : 1, while in a sample limited by absolute magnitude it changes from 4 : 1 at 2 AU, to 1 : 3 at 3.5 AU. In a size-limited sample with D > 1 km, the number ratio of S and C asteroids in the entire main belt is 1 : 2.3. The colors of Hungarias, Mars crossers, and near-Earth objects, selected by their velocity vectors, are more similar to the C-type than to S-type asteroids. In about 100 deg2 of sky along the celestial equator observed twice 2 days apart, we find one plausible Kuiper belt object (KBO) candidate, in agreement with the expected KBO surface density. The colors of the KBO candidate are significantly redder than the asteroid colors, in agreement with colors of known KBOs. We explore the possibility that SDSS data can be used to search for very red, previously uncataloged asteroids observed by 2MASS, by extracting objects without SDSS counterparts. We do not find evidence for a significant population of such objects; their contribution is no more than 10% of the asteroid population.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/066aa53f5ebbcc08ceaf826ed259cf66b1454ce1

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Citations in the corpus

Neptune’s Migration into a Stirred-Up Kuiper Belt: A Detailed Comparison of Simulations to Observations (2005, background): “Note also that nonfamily asteroids have Q ≃ 3.0 (Ivezić et al. 2001), which is slightly steeper than the canonical Q = 2.5 value that results from a collisional cascade (Dohnanyi 1969).”
Astrometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2002, background): “With the accuracy of the relative astrometry between filters, asteroids are easily detected based on their relative motions between filters within a single scan (Ivezić et al. 2001), and the same technique offers promise for the detection of Kuiper Belt objects.”
The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: 16 ⩽ BMGC < 24 galaxy counts and the calibration of the local galaxy luminosity function (2002, positive): “Recently, Ivezić et al. (2001) performed accurate measurements of the shape of the number counts of both C- and S-type asteroids for BMGC 22.5 mag from SDSS-CD.”
Yarkovsky/YORP chronology of asteroid families (2006, methodology): “, Ivezić et al., 2001; Jurić et al., 2002) to characterize the reflectance of smaller asteroids inside our families. We used the same methodology and data analysis described by Nesvorný et al. (2005), though we have taken advantage of an updated release of SDSS data. This source contains five color ”
The Size Distributions of Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog 4 (2008, methodology): “The quality of SDSS MOC data was discussed in detail by Ivezić et al. (2001) and Jurić et al. (2002), including a determination of the size and color distributions for main-belt asteroids. An analysis of the strong correlation between colors and the main-belt asteroid dynamical families was presente”
OPTICAL DISCOVERY OF PROBABLE STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION FLARES (2010, positive): “SDSS checks for moving objects by measuring the position of the centroid across different filters (Ivezić et al. 2001).”
DETECTION OF WIDESPREAD HYDRATED MATERIALS ON VESTA BY THE VIR IMAGING SPECTROMETER ON BOARD THE DAWN MISSION (2012, methodology): “Using asteroid photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey moving object catalog (Ivezic et al. 2001), we estimate that C-type asteroids constitute at most 10%–30% of all the present impacts at Vesta.”
The taxonomic distribution of asteroids from multi-filter all-sky photometric surveys (2013, methodology): “In this work we focus on the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object Catalog (SDSS, MOC, Ivezić et al. 2001, 2002) that observed over 100,000 unique asteroids in five photometric bands over visible wavelengths.”
Cratering History and Lunar Chronology (2006, methodology): “The Spacewatch data (Jedicke and Metcalfe 1998) and data of the Sloan digital sky survey (Ivezic et al. 2001) allow estimation of the asteroid SFD down to diameters of approximately 300 m. Observational data agree reasonably well with the “projectile” size frequency distribution derived from the…”
The fossilized size distribution of the main asteroid belt (2003, result): “Our results are more discordant, however, with estim from Ivezić et al. (2001, 2002) , who, using SDSS data alon report there should be 7 × 105 km-sized main belt objects This result, while within the error bars of Tedesco and Dese (2002), is still lower by nearly a factor of 2 than other es mates; ”
The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt (2015, methodology): “About 100,000 asteroids have measurements that tell us about their surface compositions (Ivezic et al., 2001, Szabo et al., 2004, Nesvorny et al., 2005, Carvano et al., 2010), providing a broader view of the Asteroid Belt than ever before.”
A Matched-Filter Analysis of the Tidal Tails of the Globular Cluster Palomar 5 (2002, background): “The positions are good to at least 0>27, 0>14 (rms) brighter than r* = 20.5 (Pier et al. 2002; Ivezić et al. 2001).”
The primordial nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2015, positive): “…compared to the empirical αc of small main belt asteroids, considered to be near steady state (Bottke et al. 2005): αc = 3.00 ± 0.05 for 5 <∼ D <∼ 40 km (Ivezić et al. 2001), αc = 2.55 for 4 <∼ D <∼ 27 km if assuming pV = 0.1 (Gladman et al. 2009), and αc = 2.34 ± 0.05 for 2 <∼ D <∼ 25 km (Ryan…”
Analysis of Systematic Effects and Statistical Uncertainties in Angular Clustering of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data (2001, background): “This conjecture has been verified by Ivezic et al. (2001) in their examination of objects doubly imaged in those regions where scan lines in interlaced strips overlap (see York et al. 2000 for an explanation of the scanning procedures).”
25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics (2014, methodology): “References to Table 15: 1) Cross (1966); 2) Sornette (2004); 3) Jedicke and Metcalfe (1998); 4) Ivezic et al. (2001); 5) Yoshida et al. (2003), Yoshida and Nakamura (2007); 6) Zebker et al. (1985), French and Nicholson (2000); 7) Uritsky et al. (2002); 8) Kozelov et al. (2004); 9) Crosby et al.…”