The Diverse Shapes of Dwarf Planet and Large KBO Phase Curves Observed from New Horizons
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Observing dwarf planets and other large Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) from vantage points between 8 and 47 au from the Sun, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has found diversity in the shapes of their solar phase curves. Here we extend solar phase angle coverage of dwarf planets (136199) Eris, (136472) Makemake, and (136108) Haumea; large KBOs (28978) Ixion, (50000) Quaoar, (307261) 2002 MS 4 , and (556416) 2014 OE 394 ; and Neptune’s satellite Triton to phase angles as high as α = 94° using New Horizons data and fit the resulting solar phase curves to the Hapke photometric model. When accounting for sparse α sampling, these fits yield large uncertainties in the Hapke parameters; however, opposition effect parameters are generally well constrained and suggest a significant range of regolith maturation ages among these bodies. The expanded range in α enables evaluation of Bond albedos, phase integrals, rotation curves at high α , and comparisons of the surface scattering properties of these objects with those of others in the solar system. The dwarf planets with surface compositions dominated by hypervolatiles, Eris and Makemake, and Triton (a likely former KBO) have shallower solar phase curve slopes (i.e., lower phase coefficients, higher phase integrals, and Bond albedos) than objects with volatile-poor surfaces. The total amplitude of Haumea’s rotation curve at α = 48° is Δ m = 0.6 ± 0.2 mag, nearly twice that of its rotation curve measured from Earth at low phase angles. Bond albedos range from 0.037 ± 0.007 for Ixion to <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msubsup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>0.99</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.09</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.01</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msubsup> </mml:math> for Eris.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it