演講資訊

摘要：

The current rate of catastrophic disruptions in the Solar System can be used to constrain models of its formation and evolution. Employing a simple model for an observed catastrophic disruption of an asteroid, we present the results of a search for catastrophic disruptions in the Pan-STARRS all-sky survey. We find that the size of objects disrupting at a rate of once per year in the main belt due to impact is no larger than ~7 m diameter, much smaller (and therefore less frequent) than predicted by contemporary models such as Bottke et al. (2005), who predicted one impact-generated disruption per year at 100 m diameter. We suggest that this discrepancy can be accounted for by rotational disruption of asteroids, found by Jacobson et al. (2014) to be much more frequent that impact-generated disruptions. We estimate that in the near-future, Pan-STARRS and other all-sky surveys may detect as many as 10 disruption events per year. We characterize the efficacy of the PS1 survey in detecting moving objects and other transients, and briefly summarize the capability of current and upcoming surveys to detect similar phenomena. We expand our discussion of future surveys to present an overview of the challenges for data processing of transient events in the era of Pan-STARRS, ATLAS, ZTF and LSST.