A shape-and-density model of the putative binary EKBO 2001 QG298

Shigeru Takahashi, I. P. Wing-Huen

研究成果: 雜誌貢獻期刊論文同行評審

17 引文 斯高帕斯(Scopus)

摘要

Recent observations of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt object (EKBO) 2001 QG 298 (Sheppard, Jewitt 2004) have shown that the lightcurve of this object has a very large amplitude (1.14 ± 0.04mag), indicating that it is either of an elongated shape or of a binary structure with two components of similar sizes nearly in contact with each other. On the basis of these interesting published data, we employed Roche binary lightcurve simulations to construct a shape model of EKBO 2001 QG298. The shape parameters of the best-fitted model were 260 (164) × 205 (130) × 185 (116) km for the primary, and 265 (168) × 160 (102) × 150 (94) km for the secondary in the case of an albedo of 0.04 (0.10). An additional result of this calculation is that the average bulk density of the contact binary system could be estimated to be 630kgm-3. This value is similar to that of several icy moons of Saturn with a diameter of less than 200 km. We have also used the Jacobi ellipsoidal approximation to compute the shape of one of the largest EKBOs, Varuna. The corresponding shape parameters are a : b : c = 1.00 : 0.76 : 0.50. The lower limit of the bulk density is p ≥ 1000kgm-3. These results are in good agreement with the published values of Jewitt and Sheppard (2002), and are consistent with their suggestion that larger icy bodies have higher densities (Sheppard, Jewitt 2002).

原文???core.languages.en_GB???
頁(從 - 到)1099-1103
頁數5
期刊Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan
56
發行號6
DOIs
出版狀態已出版 - 2004

指紋

深入研究「A shape-and-density model of the putative binary EKBO 2001 QG298」主題。共同形成了獨特的指紋。

引用此