Asteroid Discovery and Light Curve Extraction Using the Hough Transform: A Rotation Period Study for Subkilometer Main-belt Asteroids

The intranight trajectories of asteroids can be approximated by straight lines, and so are their intranight detections. Therefore, the Hough transform, a line detecting algorithm, can be used to connect the line-up detections to find asteroids. We applied this algorithm to a high-cadence Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) observation, which was originally designed to collect asteroid light curves for rotation period measurements. The algorithm recovered most of the known asteroids in the observing fields and, moreover, discovered 3574 new asteroids with magnitude mainly of 21.5 < w _p1 < 22.5 mag. This magnitude range is equivalent to subkilometer main-belt asteroids (MBAs), which usually lack rotation period measurements due to their faintness. Using the light curves of the 3574 new asteroids, we obtained 122 reliable rotation periods, of which 13 are super-fast rotators (SRFs; i.e., rotation period of <2 hr). The required cohesion to survive these SFRs range from tens to thousands of Pa, a value consistent with the known SFRs and the regolith on the Moon and Mars. The higher chance of discovering SFRs here suggests that subkilometer MBAs probably harbor more SFRs.