Six Hot Topics in Planetary Astronomy David Jewitt Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
[email protected] Abstract Six hot topics in modern planetary astronomy are described: 1) lightcurves and densities of small bodies 2) colors of Kuiper belt objects and the distri- bution of the ultrared matter 3) spectroscopy and the crystallinity of ice in the outer Solar system 4) irregular satellites of the giant planets 5) the Main Belt Comets and 6) comets and meteor stream parents. 1 Introduction The direction given to the authors of this book1 is to show some of the exciting recent developments in the study of the Solar system. Of course, \exciting" is a subjective term, and one which gives this author a lot of latitude. The most exciting science subjects for me are the ones I am working on, so I have written this chapter as a series of vignettes describing six topics from my own on-going research and from the research of my students and colleagues [principally Henry Hsieh (main belt comets), Bin Yang (spectra), Jane Luu (colors and spectra), Scott Sheppard (irregular satellites and lightcurves), Pedro Lacerda (lightcurves), Nuno Peixinho (colors) and Toshi Kasuga (meteors)]. What follows is not so much a review as a window onto these six, particularly active parts of modern planetary astronomy. The reader who wants the raw science or access to the full literature on a given subject has only to go to the journals or to astro-ph: the internet makes it easy. My objective here is to focus attention mainly on newer, perhaps less-known work, the big-picture significance of arXiv:0811.2265v1 [astro-ph] 14 Nov 2008 1 Article completed in January 2008 and to be published in \Small Bodies in Plan- etary Systems" (Mann, Nakamura and Mukai, editors), Lecture Notes in Physics, Volume 758, Springer Academic Publishers, 2008.