NEOWISE observations of 105 near-Earth objects

DOI

Only a very small fraction of the asteroid population at size scales comparable to the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia has been discovered to date, and physical properties are poorly characterized. We present previously unreported detections of 105 close approaching near-Earth objects (NEOs) by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission's NEOWISE project. These infrared observations constrain physical properties such as diameter and albedo for these objects, many of which are found to be smaller than 100m. Because these objects are intrinsically faint, they were detected by WISE during very close approaches to the Earth, often at large apparent on-sky velocities. We observe a trend of increasing albedo with decreasing size, but as this sample of NEOs was discovered by visible light surveys, it is likely that selection biases against finding small, dark NEOs influence this finding.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.17840110
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/784/110
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/784/110
Related Identifier https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/784/110
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/784/110
Provenance
Creator Mainzer A.; Bauer J.; Grav T.; Masiero J.; Cutri R.M.; Wright E.,Nugent C.R.; Stevenson R.; Clyne E.; Cukrov G.; Masci F.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2016
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Solar System Astronomy