A New Large Super-Fast Rotator: (335433) 2005 UW163

Abstract

Asteroids of size larger than 150 m generally do not have rotation periods smaller than 2.2 hours. This spin cutoff is believed to be due to the gravitationally bound rubble-pile structures of the asteroids. Rotation with periods exceeding this critical value will cause asteroid breakup. Up until now, only one object, 2001 OE84, has been found to be an exception to this spin cutoff. We report the discovery of a new super-fast rotator, (335433) 2005 UW163, spinning with a period of 1.290 hours and a lightcurve variation of $r^{\prime }\sim 0.8$ mag from the observations made at the P48 telescope and the P200 telescope of the Palomar Observatory. Its $H_{r^{\prime }}=17.69\pm 0.27$ mag and multi-band colors (i.e., $g^{\prime }-r^{\prime }=0.68\pm 0.03$ mag, $r^{\prime }-i^{\prime }=0.19\pm 0.02$ mag and SDSS $i-z=-0.45$ mag) show it is a V-type asteroid with a diameter of $0.6+0.3/-0.2$ km. This indicates (335433) 2005 UW163 is a super-fast rotator beyond the regime of the small monolithic asteroid.

18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table Accepted by ApJL

References in corpus (2)

• The Size Distributions of Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog 4
• 313 new asteroid rotation periods from Palomar Transient Factory observations

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fast Rotation and Trailing Fragments of the Active Asteroid P/2012 F5 (Gibbs)
• Discovery and Characteristics of the Rapidly Rotating Active Asteroid (62412) 2000 SY178 in the Main Belt
• The fast spin of near-Earth asteroid (455213) 2001 OE84, revisited after 14 years: constraints on internal structure
• Large Super-Fast Rotator Hunting Using the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory
• A Search for Subkilometer-sized Ordinary Chondrite Like Asteroids in the Main-Belt
• Physical characterization of NEA Large Super-Fast Rotator (436724) 2011 UW158
• Searching for Super-Fast Rotators Using the Pan-STARRS 1