Lightcurves, Rotation Periods, and Colors for Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Asteroid Discoveries
Sarah Greenstreet et al. (2026)
- Published
- Jan 7, 2026
- Journal
- The Astrophysical Journal Letters · Vol. 996 · No. 2
- DOI
- 10.3847/2041-8213/ae2a30
At a Glance
Rubin First Look photometry yields robust asteroid periods and colors, uncovering 19 superfast rotators including minute-scale spins.
Summary
Using Rubin Observatory commissioning images with unusually dense, irregular time sampling, the authors extract multiband asteroid lightcurves and derive rotation periods and colors for the first Rubin-discovered asteroids. They apply two independent period-finding pipelines plus extensive manual vetting to define reliability cuts, producing a high-confidence set of 76 rotators (75 MBAs, 1 NEO) with periods from 21.3 hr down to ~1.9 minutes. The dataset reveals 19 objects spinning faster than the 2.2 hr “spin barrier,” including several sub-km main-belt asteroids with minute-scale periods that imply substantial internal cohesion, demonstrating Rubin’s ability—even in commissioning—to probe a sparsely sampled size–spin regime for MBAs.
Method Snapshot
Multiband time-series photometry is modeled with Fourier lightcurve fits and a multiband Lomb–Scargle periodogram, cross-validated and manually screened for reliability.
Background
Basic asteroid photometry/lightcurve interpretation and time-series period-finding concepts (e.g., Lomb–Scargle, Fourier models, spin barrier).
First paper on photometry and spin-periods from Rubin First Look data. Interesting pioneering methods.
— VC