2026-01-22 ワシントン大学（UW）
＜関連情報＞
- https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/01/22/fastest-spinning-asteroid-rubin-observatory-dirac-institute/
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae2a30
ヴェラ・C・ルビン天文台による最初の小惑星発見の光度曲線、自転周期、色 Lightcurves, Rotation Periods, and Colors for Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Asteroid Discoveries
Sarah Greenstreet, Zhuofu (Chester) Li, Dmitrii E. Vavilov, Devanshi Singh, Mario Jurić, Željko Ivezić, Siegfried Eggl, Alec Koumjian, Joachim Moeyens, Valerio Carruba,…
The Astrophysical Journal Letters Published: 2026 January 7
DOI:10.3847/2041-8213/ae2a30
Abstract
We present lightcurves, rotation periods, and colors for the first asteroid discoveries made with the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. These are the first science results derived from the 2103 asteroid discoveries released as part of the Rubin First Look (RFL) media event on 2025 June 23, in which the first LSST Camera commissioning images were released. The ∼340,000 observations in which the discoveries were made span nine nights between 2025 April 21 and May 5. With a limiting single-epoch 5σ depth of ∼23–25 mag and dense temporal sampling under an irregular, commissioning-driven cadence, the RFL observations provide an ideal test bed for determination of rotation periods, including sensitivity to rapid rotation. We model lightcurves and derive rotation periods and colors for the ∼2000 objects. We find 75 main-belt asteroids (MBAs) and one near-Earth object (NEO) with reliable rotation periods spanning 0.031–21.3 hr and a photometric precision in the range of 0.05–0.15 mag. We find 19 superfast rotators with periods shorter than the 2.2 hr spin barrier. Rubin-discovered MBA 2025 MN45 is the fastest-rotating d > 0.5 km known asteroid with a rotation period of 1.9 minutes; along with NEO 2025 MJ71 (1.9 minutes) and Rubin-discovered MBAs 2025 MK41 (3.8 minutes), 2025 MV71 (13 minutes), and 2025 MG56 (16 minutes), these five super- to ultrafast rotators join a couple of NEOs as the fastest-spinning subkilometer asteroids known. As this study demonstrates, even in early commissioning, Rubin is successfully probing a previously sparsely sampled region of the subkilometer size−spin rate regime for MBAs.
