Physical Characterization of Asteroid (16583) Oersted Combining Stellar Occultation and Photometric Data
arXiv:2510.05843 · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202556313
Abstract
We report a successful observation of a stellar occultation by asteroid (16583) Oersted, enabling a detailed physical characterization of its shape, spin state, and surface properties. Our goal is to determine the physical parameters of Oersted by combining multi-chord occultation timing, sparse optical photometry, and thermal infrared observations. Such asteroids (size20 km) are rarely modeled in this detail due to observational limitations, making Oersted a valuable case study. We applied convex lightcurve inversion to sparse photometric data to derive an initial shape and spin state. This model was then refined and scaled using non-convex shape modeling with the ADAM algorithm, incorporating constraints from the occultation chord profile. Thermophysical modeling based on WISE thermal infrared fluxes was used to determine the asteroid's effective diameter, geometric albedo, and thermal inertia. The non-convex shape model reveals localized surface concavities and provides a size estimate consistent with radiometric measurements. The derived thermal inertia is typical for asteroids of comparable size. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of combining stellar occultations, photometry, and thermal infrared data for asteroid modeling and highlights the valuable contributions of citizen scientists, who played a key role in capturing the occultation and constraining the asteroid's profile.
Accepted for publication in A&A
References in corpus (19)
- The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE): Mission Description and Initial On-orbit Performance
- The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
- The Man Behind the Curtain: X-rays Drive the UV through NIR Variability in the 2013 AGN Outburst in NGC 2617
- ATLAS: A High-Cadence All-Sky Survey System
- The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0
- Main Belt Asteroids with WISE/NEOWISE I: Preliminary Albedos and Diameters
- Thermal inertia of near-Earth asteroids and implications for the magnitude of the Yarkovsky effect
- Analytic Planetary Transit Light Curves and Derivatives for Stars with Polynomial Limb Darkening
- Combining asteroid models derived by lightcurve inversion with asteroidal occultation silhouettes
- Thermophysical modeling of asteroids from WISE thermal infrared data - Significance of the shape model and the pole orientation uncertainties
- Data Release 3: the Solar System survey
- ADAM: a general method for using various data types in asteroid reconstruction
- (16) Psyche: A mesosiderite-like asteroid?
- Thermophysical modeling of main-belt asteroids from WISE thermal data
- Precise astrometry and diameters of asteroids from occultations -- a data-set of observations and their interpretation
- Adaptive optics and lightcurve data of asteroids: twenty shape models and information content analysis
- -band photometry of asteroids from ASAS-SN: Finding asteroids with slow spin
- The HD 93963 A transiting system: A 1.04d super-Earth and a 3.65 d sub-Neptune discovered by TESS and CHEOPS
- Scaling slowly rotating asteroids by stellar occultations