Another superfast find for Faulkes!

Following the request for observations of a possible superfast rotating Near Earth object on the Faulkes website, it has been confirmed that the asteroid, 2008 XC1 has a period of just 6.06 minutes (0.101hr), making it one of the top twenty superfast rotating asteroids known in the Solar System!

A request was put on the front page of the Faulkes website yesterday (9th December), and 3 users subsequently imaged the asteroid - Richard Miles of the BAA, Alison Tripp of the FT Project and Bidhannagar Government High School in India. Shown here is the lightcurve produced by Richard Miles from the data obtained by these 3 observers.

 The lightcurve was created using Astrometrica software and CMC-14 reference stars.  Although observers used various filters, a small offset of 0.056 mag was required to convert Sloan-R to R magnitude.  The Clear filter observations exhibited virtually no offset relative to R magnitude.  The plotted data look like a random arrangement of points but with an excessive scatter.

Period analysis was carried out using Peranso software on each of the three datasets first.  All three showed a very distinctive single period of about 0.00422 days.  Once the data were combined, the result obtained is shown in the composite lightcurve (lower picture).

Interestingly, Richard's own observations using a 0.28-m telescope on December 6/7 appeared to show a 'constant' brightness over several hours.  Because of this he suspected it was a very fast rotator and lo and behold it is!  So, two very different scopes were used to pursue this object.

If more observations are obtained, we may see the lightcurve evolve in shape as the phase angle changes. If you'd like to be involved in observing this asteroid, click here for more details.