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Published August 10, 2015 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Asteroids in GALEX: Near-ultraviolet Photometry of the Major Taxonomic Groups

Abstract

We present ultraviolet (UV) photometry (near-UV (NUV) band, 180–280 nm) of 405 asteroids observed serendipitously by GALEX from 2003 to 2012. All asteroids in this sample were detected by GALEX at least twice. Unambiguous visible-color-based taxonomic labels (C type versus S type) exist for 315 of these asteroids; of these, thermal-infrared-based diameters are available for 245. We derive NUV − V color using two independent models to predict the visual magnitude V at each NUV-detection epoch. Both V models produce NUV − V distributions in which the S types are redder than C types with more than 8σ confidence. This confirms that the S types' redder spectral slopes in the visible remain redder than the C types' into the NUV, this redness being consistent with absorption by silica-containing rocks. The GALEX asteroid data confirm earlier results from the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which two decades ago produced the only other sizeable set of UV asteroid photometry. The GALEX-derived NUV − V data also agree with previously published Hubble Space Telescope (HST) UV observations of asteroids 21 Lutetia and 1 Ceres. Both the HST and GALEX data indicate that NUV band is less useful than u band for distinguishing subgroups within the greater population of visible-color-defined C types (notably, M types and G types).

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 April 16; accepted 2015 May 6; published 2015 August 13. A. Waszczak has been supported in part by the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at Caltech. E.O.O. is incumbent of the Arye Dissentshik career development chair and is grateful to support by grants from the Willner Family Leadership Institute Ilan Gluzman (Secaucus NJ), Israeli Ministry of Science, Israel Science Foundation, Minerva and the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation. This work makes use of data products from the GALEX mission, developed and operated with support from JPL/Caltech, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of France and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, Orbital Sciences, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille. This work also makes use of data derived from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and the Intermediate PTF (iPTF) projects, operated at the 1.2 m Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory. Participating institutions have included Caltech, Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the University of Oxford, the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Oskar Klein Centre, the University System of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. This work also makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California Los Angeles and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/Caltech, funded by NASA. This publication also makes use of data products from NEOWISE, which is a project of JPL/Caltech, funded by the Planetary Science Division of NASA. This work also makes use of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, NASA, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Council for England.

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Published - Waszczak_2015.pdf

Submitted - 1505.01458v2.pdf

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Created:
August 20, 2023
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October 25, 2023