Star catalog position and proper motion corrections in asteroid astrometry II: The Gaia era

TL;DR

This paper improves the correction scheme for systematic errors in star catalogs used in asteroid astrometry by leveraging Gaia data, significantly enhancing the accuracy of past minor planet observations.

Contribution

It provides a new, more accurate debiasing scheme for 26 star catalogs, utilizing Gaia DR2 to correct systematic biases in asteroid astrometry.

Findings

Median stellar position differences are around tens of milliarcseconds.

Proper motion corrections range from 0.3 to 4 mas/yr.

Revised corrections eliminate artifacts near the galactic center.

Abstract

Astrometric positions of moving objects in the Solar System have been measured using a variety of star catalogs in the past. Previous work has shown that systematic errors in star catalogs can affect the accuracy of astrometric observations. That, in turn, can influence the resulting orbit fits for minor planets. In order to quantify these systematic errors, we compare the positions and proper motion of stellar sources in the most utilized star catalogs to the second release of the Gaia star catalog. The accuracy of Gaia astrometry allows us to unambiguously identify local biases and derive a scheme that can be used to correct past astrometric observations of solar system objects. Here we provide a substantially improved debiasing scheme for 26 astrometric catalogs that were extensively used in minor planet astrometry. Revised corrections near the galactic center eliminate artifacts that could be traced back to reference catalogs used in previous debiasing schemes. Median differences in stellar positions between catalogs now tend to be on the order of several tens of milliarcseconds (mas) but can be as large as 175 mas. Median stellar proper motion corrections scatter around 0.3 mas/yr and range from 1 to 4 mas/yr for star catalogs with and without proper motion, respectively. The tables in this work are meant to be applied to existing optical observations. They are not intended to correct new astrometric measurments as those should make use of the Gaia astrometric catalog. Since previous debiasing schemes already reduced systematics in past observations to a large extent, corrections beyond the current work may not be needed in the foreseeable future.