Near Infrared Absolute Magnitudes of Asteroids

Phase curves of small bodies are useful tools to obtain their absolute magnitudes and phase
coefficients. The former relates to the object’s apparent brightness, while the latter relates to how
the light interacts with the surface. Data from multi-wavelength photometric surveys, which usually
serendipitously observe small bodies, are becoming the cornerstone of large statistical studies of the
Solar System. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, all studies have been carried out in visible wavelengths.
Aims. We aim to provide the first catalog of absolute magnitudes in near-infrared filters (Y, J, H, and K).
We will also study the applicability of the HG^*₁₂ model to these data and compare it with a simple
linear model.

In this work, we compute the absolute magnitudes using two photometric models: the HG^*₁₂ and the
linear model. We use a combination of Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo sorting to compute the
probability distributions of the absolute magnitudes and corresponding phase coefficients. We use the
combination of four near-infrared photometric catalogs to create our input database.
We produced the first catalog of near-infrared magnitudes, obtaining absolute magnitudes for > 10,000
objects (with at least one absolute magnitude measured) and about 180 objects with the four absolute
magnitudes. We confirmed that a linear model that fits the phase curves produces accurate results. We
also detect a phase coloring effect in the near-infrared, as detected in visible wavelengths for asteroids
and trans-Neptunian objects.