Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscript no. btypesWISE2012AAreferee c ESO 2018 August 23, 2018 Physical properties of B-type asteroids from WISE data V. Al´ı-Lagoa1,2, J. de Le´on3, J. Licandro1,2, M. Delb´o4, H. Campins5, N. Pinilla-Alonso6,7 and M. S. Kelley8 1 Instituto de Astrof´ısica de Canarias (IAC), c/ V´ıa L´actea s/n, 38205, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Departamento de Astrof´ısica, Universidad de La Laguna. 38206, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 3 Departamento de Edafolog´ıa y Geolog´ıa, Universidad de La Laguna. 38206, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain 4 UNS-CNRS-Observatoire de la Cˆote d’Azur, B.P. 4229, 06304 Nice Cedex 4, France 5 Physics Department, University of Central Florida, P. O. Box 162385, Orlando, FL 32816.2385, USA 6 Instituto de Astrof´ısica de Andaluc´ıa (IAA), Granada, Spain 7 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Tennessee, 1412 Circle Dr, Knoxville TN 37996-1410 8 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20472-2421, USA Received 31 October 2012; accepted 19 March 2013 (v1) ABSTRACT Aims. Our aim is to obtain more information about the physical nature of B-type asteroids and extend on the previous work by studying their physical properties derived from fitting an asteroid thermal model to their NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) data. We also exam- ine the Pallas collisional family, a B-type family with a moderately high albedo in contrast to the large majority of B-types. Methods. We apply a combination of the Near-Earth Asteroid Thermal Model and a model of the reflected sunlight to WISE asteroid data in order to derive up to four parameters: effective diameter (D), the so-called infrared beaming parameter (η), ratio of infrared to visible albedo (Rp = pIR/pV ) and visible geometric albedo (pV ).