Asteroid rotation periods from the Palomar Transient Factory survey

TL;DR

This study utilizes the Palomar Transient Factory survey to detect and analyze asteroid rotation periods, discovering new asteroids and providing high-quality rotation data for main-belt asteroids, demonstrating the survey's potential for asteroid characterization.

Contribution

The paper introduces a pipeline for extracting asteroid rotation periods from high-cadence PTF data and reports the first results, including new asteroid discoveries and rotation measurements.

Findings

Detected 624 asteroids, 145 of which are new discoveries.

Provided high-quality rotation periods for 88 main-belt asteroids.

Estimated that the method can yield rotation periods for about 10,000 asteroids.

Abstract

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a synoptic survey designed to explore the transient and variable sky in a wide variety of cadences. We use PTF observations of fields that were observed multiple times (>=10) per night, for several nights, to find asteroids, construct their lightcurves and measure their rotation periods. Here we describe the pipeline we use to achieve these goals and present the results from the first four (overlapping) PTF fields analyzed as part of this program. These fields, which cover an area of 21 deg^2, were observed on four nights with a cadence of ~20 min. Our pipeline was able to detect 624 asteroids, of which 145 (~20%) were previously unknown. We present high quality rotation periods for 88 main-belt asteroids and possible period or lower limit on the period for an additional 85 asteroids. For the remaining 451 asteroids, we present lower limits on their photometric amplitudes. Three of the asteroids have lightcurves that are characteristic of binary asteroids. We estimate that implementing our search for all existing high-cadence PTF data will provide rotation periods for about 10,000 asteroids mainly in the magnitude range ~14 to ~20.