Abstract
Abstract A stable population of objects co-orbiting with Venus was recently hypothesized in order to explain the existence of Venus’s co-orbital dust ring. We conducted a five days twilight survey for these objects with the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory 4 m telescope covering about 35 unique square degrees to 21 mag in the r band. Our survey provides the most stringent limit so far on the number of Venus co-orbital asteroids; it was capable of detecting 5% of the entire population of those asteroids brighter than 21 mag. We estimate an upper limit on the number of co-orbital asteroids brighter than 21 mag (approximately 400–900 m in diameter depending on the asteroid albedo) to be . Previous studies estimated the mass of the observed dust ring co-orbiting with Venus to be equivalent to an asteroid with a 2 km diameter ground to dust. Our survey estimates <6 asteroids larger than 2 km. This implies the following possibilities: that Venus co-orbitals are nonreflective at the observed phase angles, have a very low albedo (<1%), or that the Venus co-orbital dust ring has a source other than asteroids co-orbiting Venus. We discuss this result, and as an aid to future searches, we provide predictions for the spatial, visual magnitude, and number density distributions of stable Venus co-orbitals based on the dynamics of the region and magnitude estimates for various asteroid types.
Highlights
There are currently 5 known Venus co-orbital asteroids, defined as objects in 1:1 mean motion resonance (MMR) with Venus: 2001 CK32 (Brasser et al 2004), 2002 VE68 (Mikkola et al 2004), 2012 XE133, 2013 ND15, and 2015 WZ12
As an aid to future searches, we provide predictions for the spatial, visual magnitude, and number density distributions of stable Venus co-orbitals based on the dynamics of the region and magnitude estimates for various asteroid types
In previous paragraphs we showed that our Dark Energy Camera (DECam) survey should have seen on average P = 4.82% of the Venus co-orbital population, with a total number Ntot of co-orbital asteroids that would appear in our field-of-view brighter than mr = 21
Summary
Sheppard 4 1Department of Physics, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, USA 2Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 3Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 4Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC, 20015
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