FOSSIL: I. The Spin Rate Limit of Jupiter Trojans

2021/07/14 by Chang, Chan-Kao, Chen, Ying-Tung, Fraser, Wesley C. +25 · 1 citation
#Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.06685

Abstract

Rotation periods of 53 small (diameters 2 < D < 40 km) Jupiter Trojans (JTs) were derived using the high-cadence light curves obtained by the FOSSIL phase I survey, a Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam intensive program. These are the first reported periods measured for JTs with D < 10 km. We found a lower limit of the rotation period near 4 hr, instead of the previously published result of 5 hr (Ryan et al. 2017; Szabo et al. 2017, 2020) found for larger JTs. Assuming a rubble-pile structure for JTs, a bulk density of 0.9 gcm^-3 is required to withstand this spin rate limit, consistent with the value 0.8-1.0 gcm^-3 (Marchis et al. 2006; Mueller et al. 2010; Buie et al. 2015; Berthier et al. 2020) derived from the binary JT system, (617) Patroclus-Menoetius system.

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