| Issue |
A&A
Volume 675, July 2023
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A24 | |
| Number of page(s) | 13 | |
| Section | Planets and planetary systems | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202345889 | |
| Published online | 28 June 2023 | |
Reconstruction of asteroid spin states from Gaia DR3 photometry★
Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Astronomy,
V Holešovičkách 2,
180 00
Prague,
Czech Republic
e-mail: durech@sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz
Received:
11
January
2023
Accepted:
2
May
2023
Aims. Gaia Data Release 3 contains accurate photometric observations of more than 150 000 asteroids covering a time interval of 34 months. With a total of about 3 000 000 measurements, a typical number of observations per asteroid ranges from a few to several tens. We aimed to reconstruct the spin states and shapes of asteroids from this dataset.
Methods. We computed the viewing and illumination geometry for each individual observation and used the light curve inversion method to find the best-fit asteroid model, which was parameterized by the sidereal rotation period, the spin axis direction, and a low-resolution convex shape. To find the best-fit model, we ran the inversion for tens of thousands of trial periods on interval 2–10 000 h, with tens of initial pole directions. To find the correct rotation period, we also used a triaxial ellipsoid model for the shape approximation.
Results. In most cases the number of data points was insufficient to uniquely determine the rotation period. However, for about 8600 asteroids we were able to determine the spin state uniquely together with a low-resolution convex shape model. This large sample of new asteroid models enables us to study the spin distribution in the asteroid population. The distribution of spins confirms previous findings that (i) small asteroids have poles clustered toward ecliptic poles, likely because of the YORP-induced spin evolution, (ii) asteroid migration due to the Yarkovsky effect depends on the spin orientation, and (iii) members of asteroid families have the sense of rotation correlated with their proper semimajor axis: over the age of the family, orbits of prograde rotators evolved, due to the Yarkovsky effect, to larger semimajor axes, while those of retrograde rotators drifted in the opposite direction.
Key words: minor planets, asteroids: general / methods: data analysis / techniques: photometric
Full Table 3 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr (130.79.128.5) or via https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/675/A24
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.