Small Bodies and Large Surveys: What Modern Dynamics can teach us about the Solar System

Abstract

While the major bodies that make up the solar system, including planets, comets, the Moon, and the Sun, have been known since antiquity, our knowledge of asteroids is relatively recent. The discovery of Ceres in 1801 both revolutionized our understanding of the solar system and launched a new era in the study of its dynamics. Since then, asteroids have been a source of fascination for both amateur and professional astronomers. Indeed, the study and characterization of asteroids, especially those in the main belt, has been extraordinarily scientifically productive, yielding insights into the dynamical properties of the solar system, the histories of planetary bodies, and compositional gradients in the young protoplanetary disk. Most recently, with the advent of new astronomical surveys that exhibit greater astrometric precision, phase coverage, and an increased number of observed asteroids, combined with advancements in dynamical methods and improvements in machine learning and computation, we can reanalyze the asteroid population. This offers a new, modern perspective on the properties and dynamics of the solar system’s smallest members. This thesis presents several such analyses. We first examine the potential for distant solar system bodies to be detected gravitationally through observations of small bodies, planets, and spacecraft. We then turn our attention to the modeling of visual albedo across the main belt—we take advantage of the correlation of the albedo with asteroid proper orbital elements to make predictions about the albedos of asteroids yet to be observed, extending existing catalogs by nearly a factor of five. Third, we examine the prospects of measuring asteroid masses by taking advantage of Gaia’s precise astrometry and modeling dynamical scattering between asteroids in the main belt. Finally, we consider the relationship of an asteroid’s taxonomy to its phase curve and find that certain inferences about asteroid spectra can be made solely using well-sampled phase curves.