Feature-based asteroid taxonomy in 3D color space Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Roh D.-G.
  2. Moon H.-K.
  3. Shin M.-S.
  4. DeMeo F.E.
  5. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

The taxonomic classification of asteroids has been mostly based on spectroscopic observations with wavelengths spanning from the visible (VIS) to the near-infrared (NIR). VIS-NIR spectra of ~2500 asteroids have been obtained since the 1970s; the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Moving Object Catalog 4 (MOC 4) was released with ~4x105 measurements of asteroid positions and colors in the early 2000s. A number of works then devised methods to classify these data within the framework of existing taxonomic systems. Some of these works, however, used 2D parameter space (e.g., gri slope vs. z-i color) that displayed a continuous distribution of clouds of data points resulting in boundaries that were artificially defined. We introduce here a more advanced method to classify asteroids based on existing systems. This approach is simply represented by a triplet of SDSS colors. The distributions and memberships of each taxonomic type are determined by machine learning methods in the form of both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. We apply our scheme to MOC 4 calibrated with VIS-NIR reflectance spectra. We successfully separate seven different taxonomy classification (C, D, K, L, S, V, and X) with which we have a sufficient number of spectroscopic datasets. We found the overlapping regions of taxonomic types in a 2D plane were separated with relatively clear boundaries in the 3D space newly defined in this work. Our scheme explicitly discriminates between different taxonomic types (e.g., K and X types), which is an improvement over existing systems. This new method for taxonomic classification has a great deal of scalability for asteroid research, such as space weathering in the S-complex, and the origin and evolution of asteroid families. We present the structure of the asteroid belt, and describe the orbital distribution based on our newly assigned taxonomic classifications. It is also possible to extend the methods presented here to other photometric systems, such as the Johnson-Cousins and LSST filter systems.

Keywords
  1. solar-system
  2. asteroids
  3. photometry
  4. galaxy-classification-systems
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2022A&A...664A..51R
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/664/A51
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/664/A51
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.36640051

Access

Web browser access HTML
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/664/A51
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/664/A51
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/664/A51
IVOA Table Access TAP
http://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).

History

2022-08-08T08:37:48Z
Resource record created
2022-08-08T08:37:48Z
Created
2022-12-16T22:27:31Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr