Active Asteroid 311P/PANSTARRS: Rotational Instability as the Origin of Multi-tails?

Abstract

The active asteroid 311P is one of the two targets of a planned Chinese asteroid exploration mission Tianwen-2. During 2013, 311P experienced several mass-loss events and exhibited multiple comet-like tails. Here we analyze the morphology and surface brightness of the tails to investigate the dust environment around the nucleus and mechanism of activities. We enhance the features of the tails using image processing techniques to obtain information about the morphology of the tails, and fit processed images to the syndyne-synchrone diagrams. The fitting results give estimations of the upper limits of the durations ($2\sim 8$ days) of eruptions and the dust size range ($0.006\sim 38.9$ mm) in the tails. The results of surface photometry performed for each dust tail show that the brightness distribution index of each tail ranged from approximately -1.81 to 0 and the dust size distribution indices of 311P's tails ranged from -2.29 to -1.45. The quantity of particles in each tail ranged from 0.5 to 8 $\times 10^6$\,kg, which leads to a total dust-loss quantity of $3.0\times 10^7$\,kg and a mass loss rate of 1.59 kg s${}^{-1}$. Sublimation, continuous impacts or tidal forces of planets are excluded as explanations for 311P's activities, and rotational instability remains a possible activation cause without strong evidence against it.

arXiv comment18 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables

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