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Col-OSSOS: Compositional Homogeneity of Three Kuiper Belt Binaries Michael Marsset, Wesley Fraser, Michele Bannister, Megan Schwamb, Rosemary Pike, Susan Benecchi, J

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Col-OSSOS: Compositional Homogeneity of Three Kuiper Belt Binaries Michael Marsset, Wesley Fraser, Michele Bannister, Megan Schwamb, Rosemary Pike, Susan Benecchi, J Col-OSSOS: Compositional Homogeneity of Three Kuiper Belt Binaries Michael Marsset, Wesley Fraser, Michele Bannister, Megan Schwamb, Rosemary Pike, Susan Benecchi, J. Kavelaars, Mike Alexandersen, Ying-Tung Chen, Brett Gladman, et al. To cite this version: Michael Marsset, Wesley Fraser, Michele Bannister, Megan Schwamb, Rosemary Pike, et al.. Col- OSSOS: Compositional Homogeneity of Three Kuiper Belt Binaries. The Planetary Science Journal, IOP Science, 2020, 1 (1), pp.16. 10.3847/PSJ/ab8cc0. hal-02884321 HAL Id: hal-02884321 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02884321 Submitted on 17 Dec 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License The Planetary Science Journal, 1:16 (9pp), 2020 June https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/ab8cc0 © 2020. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Col-OSSOS: Compositional Homogeneity of Three Kuiper Belt Binaries Michaël Marsset1,2 , Wesley C. Fraser2 , Michele T. Bannister3 , Megan E. Schwamb2,4 , Rosemary E Pike5,6 , Susan Benecchi7 , J. J. Kavelaars8,9 , Mike Alexandersen5,6 , Ying-Tung Chen5 , Brett J. Gladman10 , Stephen D. J. Gwyn8 , Jean-Marc Petit11 , and Kathryn Volk12 1 Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; [email protected] 2 Astrophysics Research Centre, Queenʼs University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK 3 School of Physical and Chemical Sciences—Te Kura Matū, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand 4 Gemini Observatory, Northern Operations Center, 670 North A’ohoku Place, Hilo, HI 96720, USA 5 Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica; 11F of AS/NTU Astronomy-Mathematics Building, No.1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd Taipei 10617, Taiwan, R.O.C. 6 Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 7 Planetary Science Institute, 1700 East Fort Lowell, Suite 106, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA 8 NRC-Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, National Research Council of Canada, 5071 West Saanich Road, Victoria, BC V9E 2E7, Canada 9 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, Elliott Building, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada 10 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada 11 Institut UTINAM UMR6213, CNRS, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté, OSU Theta F-25000 Besançon, France 12 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, The University of Arizona, 1629 East University Boulevard, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA Received 2020 January 22; revised 2020 April 20; accepted 2020 April 22; published 2020 May 20 Abstract The surface characterization of Trans-Neptunian binaries (TNBs) is key to understanding the properties of the disk of planetesimals from which these objects formed. In the optical wavelengths, it has been demonstrated that most equal-sized component systems share similar colors, suggesting they have a similar composition. The color homogeneity of binary pairs contrasts with the overall diversity of colors in the Kuiper Belt, which was interpreted as evidence that Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) formed from a locally homogeneous and globally heterogeneous protoplanetary disk. In this paradigm, binary pairs must have formed early, before the dynamically hot TNOs were scattered out from their formation location. The latter inferences, however, relied on the assumption that the matching colors of the binary components imply matching composition. Here, we test this assumption by examining the component-resolved photometry of three TNBs found in the Outer Solar System Origins Survey: 505447 (2013SQ99), 511551 (2014UD225), and 506121 (2016BP81), across the visible and J-band near- infrared wavelength range. We report similar colors within 2σ for the binary pairs, which is suggestive of similar reflectance spectra and hence surface composition. This advocates for gravitational collapse of pebble clouds as a possible TNO formation route. However, we stress that several similarly small TNOs, including at least one binary, have been shown to exhibit substantial spectral variability in the near-infrared, implying color equality of binary pairs is likely to be violated in some cases. Unified Astronomy Thesaurus concepts: Trans-Neptunian objects (1705); Broad band photometry (184) 1. Introduction (TNBs) components. Simulations of co-formation by gravita- Since the discovery of Plutoʼs moon Charon (Christy & tional collapses currently provide the best match to the Harrington 1978), more than a hundred binaries have been observed properties of the equal-size TNBs (Nesvorný et al. detected in the Kuiper Belt,13 the population of planetesimals 2019; Robinson et al. 2020), including their prevalence (Noll near and beyond the orbit of Neptune. Several mechanisms et al. 2008; Fraser et al. 2017; although maybe not at small > ) have been invoked for the origin of these systems, from mutual sizes, Hr 7.5; Pike et al. 2020 , their broad inclination gravitational captures (Goldreich et al. 2002; Funato et al. distribution, and their predominantly prograde orbits (Grundy 2004; Schlichting & Sari 2008) to disruptions of fast rotators et al. 2019). This scenario also explains the high fraction of “ ” (Ortiz et al. 2012) and co-formation through gravitational widely separated binaries in the dynamically quiescent cold collapses of pebble clouds in the primordial turbulent disk (low inclination and eccentricity) population of the Kuiper Belt, (Johansen et al. 2007; Nesvorný et al. 2010). Each formation compared to the dynamically “hot” component where wide mechanism is expected to result in different physical properties, binaries would have been disrupted by Neptune scattering such as size, size ratio, orbit pole orientation, and (dis) (Parker & Kavelaars 2010; Nesvorný & Vokrouhlický 2019). similarity in composition, of the Trans-Neptunian binaries’ In this scenario, the TNBs would share the same composition, having accreted in the same environment. In the optical wavelengths, Benecchi et al. (2009) found that 13 http://www2.lowell.edu/users/grundy/tnbs/status.html 106 binary sys- the components of similar-sized TNBs share the same colors tems as of 2020 April 20. and interpreted this as evidence that they have similar composition. The similar colors of the pair members further Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further contrast with the variety of colors among the overall population distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs; e.g., Tegler & Romanishin of the work, journal citation and DOI. 1998, 2000, 2003; Tegler et al. 2003, 2008, 2016; also see 1 The Planetary Science Journal, 1:16 (9pp), 2020 June Marsset et al. Peixinho et al. 2003, 2012, 2015; Fraser & Brown 2012; sky flats were produced from an average of the science frames Lacerda et al. 2014; Fraser et al. 2015; Pike et al. 2017; Wong with sources masked and were used to flatten these frames. & Brown 2017; Alvarez-Candal et al. 2019; Marsset et al. Finally, the GMOS charge-coupled device (CCD) chips were 2019; Schwamb et al. 2019; Thirouin & Sheppard 2019), mosaicked into a single extension. suggesting these objects formed from a locally homogeneous For the NIRI images, flat-fielding was performed with a master and globally heterogeneous protoplanetary disk. This inference, flat built from the Gemini facility calibration unit flats. We however, relies on the assumption that matching optical colors produced one sky frame for each individual science image from a imply matching composition. However, optical colors are not rolling average of the 15 temporally closest science images with sufficient to infer compositional (dis)similarities of the binary sources masked, in order to account for temporal sky variation. components, because different ices and chemical elements in Images acquired at similar dither positions to the image to sky- ( the outer solar system share similar optical colors e.g., Barucci subtract were not used to compute the average sky frame. Bad ) et al. 2011 , and many of these elements only distinctively pixel maps were created from the individual dark exposures, using reveal themselves outside of optical wavelengths. Measuring the longest exposures to flag dead and low-sensitive pixels, and the composition would normally require measuring albedo and fl shortest ones to identify hot pixels. These maps were then re ectance spectra of the components across the full visible and combined with the NIRI static bad pixel map provided in the near-infrared spectral ranges. As most TNOs are too faint for Gemini IRAF package. Individual sky-subtracted images were spectroscopy, one must instead rely on what near-simultaneous aligned sidereally using multiple star centroids in order to create a multiband photometry reveal as a proxy. deep stacked image of pointlike stars that can be used to compute In this short
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