PS1 light curves and rotation periods of new asteroids

Therefore, the Hough transform, a line detecting algorithm, can be used to connect the line-up detections to find asteroids. We applied this algorithm to a high-cadence Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) observation, which was originally designed to collect asteroid light curves for rotation period measurements.

The algorithm recovered most of the known asteroids in the observing fields and, moreover, discovered 3574 new asteroids with magnitude mainly of 21.5<w_p1_<22.5mag. This magnitude range is equivalent to subkilometer main-belt asteroids (MBAs), which usually lack rotation period measurements due to their faintness. Using the light curves of the 3574 new asteroids, we obtained 122 reliable rotation periods, of which 13 are super-fast rotators (SRFs; i.e., rotation period of <2hr).