Abstract
The rotation period is one of the fundamental physical characteristics of asteroids. It can be determined from photometric measurements by standard methods of time-series period analysis or by creating a physical model of an asteroid with the rotation period being one of the fitted parameters. We used the latter approach to determine the sidereal rotation period for more than 5000 asteroids, out of which about 1600 are those for which their period was not known. We processed photometric measurements of about 100,000 asteroids from the ATLAS survey with the light curve inversion technique in the Asteroids@home project to search for the best-fit rotation period. This was repeated 25 times with randomly resampled—bootstrapped—data. For thousands of asteroids, their best-fit period was the same for most of the bootstrapped data sets; thus, their rotation period was determined with a high degree of reliability.
Highlights
Asteroid photometry is a simple yet powerful tool to reveal some basic physical properties of observed objects
When an asteroid is observed over a longer time interval, its light curves change as the aspect and the solar phase angle change
If the coverage of geometries is sufficient, the evolving shape of the light curves uniquely defines the direction of the rotation axis and the convex shape of the asteroid, together with the sidereal rotation period (Kaasalainen and Ďurech, 2020)
Summary
Asteroid photometry is a simple yet powerful tool to reveal some basic physical properties of observed objects. The process of reconstruction of asteroid shape and spin is called light curve inversion, and it can be done almost routinely if there is a sufficient amount of observations (Kaasalainen et al, 2001, 2002). Instead of a curve, we have individual sparse-in-time brightness measurements This data type are typically produced by sky surveys and they can be used the same way as light curves for the shape and spin reconstruction of asteroids (Kaasalainen, 2004). With the light curve inversion, the shape and spin of an asteroid are found by fitting a model (described by the rotation period P, the direction of the spin axis in ecliptic coordinates (λ, β), and parameters of a convex shape) to data. In our previous work (Ďurech et al, 2020), we used the same data to derive full shape/spin models
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