The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Millimeter Observations of a Population of Asteroids or: ACTeroids

Understand

We present fluxes and light curves for a population of asteroids at millimeter (mm) wavelengths, detected by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) over 18, 000 deg2 of the sky using data from 2017 to 2021.

• We utilize high cadence maps, which can be used in searching for moving objects such as asteroids and trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), as well as for studying transients.
• We detect 160 asteroids with a signal-to-noise of at least 5 in at least one of the ACT observing bands, which are centered near 90, 150, and 220 GHz.
• For each asteroid, we compare the ACT measured flux to predicted fluxes from the Near Earth Asteroid Thermal Model (NEATM) fit to WISE data.