Colors and Spectra of Kuiper Belt Objects
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present new measurements of the optical colors of Kuiper belt objects, principally from the Keck 10 m telescope. The measurements confirm the existence of a wide spread in the B-V, V-R, and R-I color indices as we found previously. Relative to the sun, the Kuiper belt objects exhibit reflected colors from nearly neutral to very red. The optical and optical-infrared (V-J) color indices are mutually correlated, showing the presence of a single reddening agent from 0.45 to 1.2 μm. On the other hand, we find no evidence for linear correlations between the color and absolute magnitude (a proxy for size), instantaneous heliocentric distance, semimajor axis, or with any other orbital property. In this regard, the Kuiper belt objects differ from the main-belt asteroids, in which strong radial color gradients exist. We find no statistically significant evidence for bimodal or other nonuniform color distributions, either in our data or in data previously reported to show such evidence. The impact resurfacing hypothesis is reexamined in the light of the new color data and is rejected as the primary cause of the observed color dispersion. We also present new near-infrared reflection spectra of 1993 SC, 1996 TS66, 1999 DE9 and 2000 EB173, taken at the Keck and Subaru telescopes. These spectra, combined with others from the published literature, provide independent evidence for compositional diversity in the Kuiper belt. Objects 2000 EB173, 1993 SC, and 1996 TS66 are spectrally bland, while 1999 DE9 shows solid-state absorption bands.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da8531abfd082eb7212b9ed1b3f46908c71d83c4
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Colors of Minor Bodies in the Outer Solar System ?;?? A statistical analysis (2002, unknown): “The models of collisional resurfacing balancing the reddening (Luu & Jewitt 1996a; Jewitt & Luu 2001) predict that the smaller objects will have a broader range of colors, which is not observed.”
- The primordial nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2015, background): “That band, and an associated one at 1.4 µm, were seen by Jewitt & Luu (2001) in the Centaur 1999 DE9.”
- A Correlation between Inclination and Color in the Classical Kuiper Belt (2002, methodology): “Objects are reddened from the visible throughout the near-IR (Davies et al. 2000), presumably from a single coloring agent (Jewitt and Luu 2001), although the physical and chemical mechanisms for the reddening process have not been identified.”
- From Kuiper Belt Object to Cometary Nucleus: The Missing Ultrared Matter (2002, methodology): “We take theV R dis- tribution for KBOs from Jewitt & Luu (2001) and for the Centaurs from Barucci et al. (2001) and Peixinho et al. (2001).”
- Kuiper Belt Objects: Relics from the Accretion Disk of the Sun (2002, methodology): “DE9 shows absorption features due to water ice (2 µm), silicates (1 µm), and the OH stretch (1.4 and 2.25 µm).”
- The Size Distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects (2004, background): “For a random phase angle between the line of sight from Earth to the object and the line of sight from the Sun to the object, the distance of the object from Earth is dE ¼ d cos ½1þ d2 (cos2 1) 1=2 .”
- Time-resolved Photometry of Kuiper Belt Objects: Rotations, Shapes, and Phase Functions (2002, methodology): “The colors B V = 0.92 0.04, V R = 0.63 0.03, and R I = 0.56 0.03 (Tables 5 and 6) show that 2000 GN171 is red but unremarkably so as a KBO (Jewitt & Luu 2001).”
- NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY OF TROJAN ASTEROIDS: EVIDENCE FOR TWO COMPOSITIONAL GROUPS (2008, methodology): “We followed the approach of Jewitt & Luu (2001) in computing Monte Carlo models of 79 randomly selected colors between the minimum and maximum of the color index from the Trojan dataset, then determining the largest interval between consecutive colors.”
- Full numerical simulations of catastrophic small body collisions (2008, background): “tions in the surface composition of the largest bodies (Brown 2008). In addition, the colors of KBOs may suggest division into subgroups with dierent dynamical histories (Doressoundiram et al. 2001; Jewitt and Luu 2001; Doressoundiram et al. 2005). Bulk densities and inferences about internal struct”