Colours of minor bodies in the outer solar system - II: A statistical analysis revisited

TL;DR

This paper updates a comprehensive database of colours and magnitudes of minor bodies in the outer solar system, enabling detailed statistical analysis of their physical and dynamical properties.

Contribution

It provides an expanded, carefully curated dataset with improved selection methods, facilitating robust analysis of colour and magnitude distributions among outer solar system objects.

Findings

Identification of distinct colour distributions among different classes

Detection of correlations between colours and dynamical parameters

Rejection of datasets with high dispersion to ensure data quality

Abstract

We present an update of the visible and near-infrared colour database of Minor Bodies in the Outer Solar System (MBOSSes), which now includes over 2000 measurement epochs of 555 objects, extracted from over 100 articles. The list is fairly complete as of December 2011. The database is now large enough to enable any dataset with a large dispersion to be safely identified and rejected from the analysis. The selection method used is quite insensitive to individual outliers. Most of the rejected datasets were observed during the early days of MBOSS photometry. The spectral gradient over the visible range is derived from the colours, as well as the R absolute magnitude M(1, 1). The average colours, absolute magnitude, and spectral gradient are listed for each object, as well as the physico-dynamical classes using a classification adapted from Gladman and collaborators. Colour-colour diagrams, histograms, and various other plots are presented to illustrate and investigate class characteristics and trends with other parameters, whose significances are evaluated using standard statistical tests. The colour tables and all plots are also available on the MBOSS colour web page http://www.eso.org/~ohainaut/MBOSS which will be updated when new measurements are published.