Within the Surveys: Spins of asteroids derived from Gaia DR3 and ATLAS photometry

Large surveys are invaluable sources of asteroid photometry. If there are enough data points with sufficient photometric accuracy, this sparse-in-time photometry can be used for asteroid shape and spin-state reconstruction with the light curve inversion method [1], [2].

We will present our results obtained by processing asteroid photometry from Gaia DR3 [3] and ATLAS [4]. We have derived convex shape models and spin states for about 15,000 asteroids. The distribution of asteroid spins across the main belt and in asteroid families is size-dependent and clearly shows that the rotation axes of asteroids are affected by the thermal YORP effect, which then affects the semimajor drift due to the Yarkovsky effect.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the grant 23-04946S of the Czech Science Foundation.

References: [1] Kaasalainen et al. (2001), Icarus 153, 37. [2] Kaasalainen (2004), A&A 422, L39. [3] Tanga et al. (2023), A&A 674, A12. [4] Tonry et al. (2018), PASP 130, 064505.