Absolute colours and phase coefficients of trans-Neptunian objects: Correlations and Populations

Abstract

The study of the visible colours of the trans-Neptunian objects opened a discussion almost 20 years ago which, in spite of the increase in the amount of available data, seems far from subside. Visible colours impose constraints to the current theories of the early dynamical evolution of the Solar System such as the environment of formation, initial surface composition, and how (if) they were scattered to regions closer to the inner planets. In this paper we present an updated version of our database of absolute colours and relative phase coefficients for 117 objects. We define the absolute colours as the difference of the absolute magnitudes $H_V-H_R$, and the relative phase coefficient as the difference of the slopes of the phase curves $\Delta\beta$. These were obtained joining our own observations plus data from the literature. The methodology has been introduced in previous works and here we expand in some interesting results, in particular the strong anti-correlation found between $H_V-H_R$ and $\Delta\beta$, which means that redder objects have steeper phase curves in the R filter, while bluer objects have steeper phase curves in the V filter. We analyse a series of results published in the literature in view of our database, which is free of phase effects, and show that their statistical meaning is not very strong. We point out that phase-colouring and observational errors play an important role in the understanding of these proposed relationships.