Active Asteroid 311P/PanSTARRS: Rotational Instability as the Origin of its Multitails?

Abstract

The active asteroid 311P/PanSTARRS is one of the two targets of the planned Chinese asteroid exploration mission Tianwen-2. During 2013, 311P experienced several mass-loss events and exhibited multiple comet-like tails. Here we analyze the morphology and surface brightness of the tails to investigate the dust environment around the nucleus and the mechanism of activities. We enhance the features of the tails using image processing techniques to obtain information about the morphologies of the tails, and fit the processed images with syndyne–synchrone diagrams. The fitting results give estimations of the upper limits of the durations (2–8 days) of eruptions and the dust size ranges (0.006 –38.9 mm) in the tails. The results of surface photometry performed for each dust tail show that the brightness distribution index of each tail ranged from approximately −1.81 to 0 and the dust size distribution indices of 311P's tails ranged from −2.29 to −1.45. The quantity of particles in each tail ranged from 0.5 to 8 × 10 ^6 kg, which leads to a total dust-loss quantity of 3.0 × 10 ^7 kg and a mass-loss rate of 1.59 kg s ^−1 . Sublimation, continuous impacts, or tidal forces of planets are excluded as explanations for 311P’s activities, and rotational instability remains a possible activation cause without strong evidence against it.

Keywords

• Main belt asteroids
• Comet dust tails