Evidence for a Collisional Mechanism Affecting Kuiper Belt Object Colors

Abstract

The Kuiper Belt (KB) region of the solar system, stretching from 30 to at least 50 AU, contains Pluto-Charon, some ~105 Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) larger than 100 km in diameter, and myriad smaller bodies produced by collisions among KBOs (Farinella, Davis, & Stern 2000). The most notable physical attribute of the KBOs discovered to date is their reflectance color diversity, ranging from gray (i.e., neutral) to very red (Tegler & Romanishin 2000). We report here evidence for a statistical correlation between the colors of KBOs and the mean random impact speed that these objects experience, lending evidence to suggestions some years ago by modelers (Jewitt & Luu 1996) that a competition between collisional resurfacing and radiation reddening may contribute to the color diversity of KBOs.

References in corpus (2)

• Colors and Spectra of Kuiper Belt Objects
• A Correlation Between Inclination and Color in the Classical Kuiper Belt

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• HST/ACS Multiband Coronagraphic Imaging of the Debris Disk around Beta Pictoris
• The Compositions of Kuiper Belt Objects
• Evidence for Two Populations of Classical Transneptunian Objects: The Strong Inclination Dependence of Classical Binaries
• Spitzer Evidence for a Late Heavy Bombardment and the Formation of Urelites in η Corvi at ~1 Gyr
• A hypothesis for the color diversity of the Kuiper belt
• Study of the Surface of 2003 EL61: the largest carbon-depleted object in the trans-neptunian belt
• Reanalyzing the visible colors of Centaurs and KBOs: what is there and what we might be missing
• Diverse Albedos of Small Trans-Neptunian Objects
• The Color Differences of Kuiper Belt Objects in Resonance with Neptune
• Col-OSSOS: Color and Inclination are Correlated Throughout the Kuiper Belt
• A Southern Sky and Galactic Plane Survey for Bright Kuiper Belt Objects
• The water ice rich surface of (145453) 2005 RR43: a case for a carbon-depleted population of TNOs?
• Rotationally resolved spectroscopy of (20000) Varuna in the near-infrared
• Causal evidence for the primordiality of colours in trans-Neptunian objects