Infrared Colors of Small Serendipitously Found Asteroids in the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey

Abstract

The UKIRT Hemisphere Survey covers the northern sky in the infrared from 0° to 60° decl. Current data releases include both J and K bands, with H -band data forthcoming. Here, we present a novel pipeline to recover asteroids from this survey data. We recover 26,138 reliable observations, corresponding to 23,399 unique asteroids, from these public data. We measure J – K colors for 601 asteroids. Our survey extends about 2 mag deeper than the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey. We find that our small inner main belt objects are less red than larger inner belt objects, perhaps because smaller asteroids are collisionally younger, with surfaces that have been less affected by space weathering. In the middle and outer main belts, we find our small asteroids to be redder than larger objects in their same orbits, possibly due to observational bias or a disproportionate population of very red objects among these smaller asteroids. Future work on this project includes extracting moving object measurements from H- and Y- band data when it becomes available.

Keywords

• Asteroids
• Sky surveys
• Near infrared astronomy
• Main belt asteroids