We present new optical colors for 28 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and 35 Centaur objects measured with the 1.8 m Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope and the 4.3 m Discovery Channel Telescope. By combining these new colors with our previously published colors, we increase the sample size of our survey to 154 objects. Our survey is unique in that the uncertainties in our color measurements are less than half the uncertainties in the color measurements reported by other researchers in the literature. Small uncertainties are essential for discerning between a unimodal and a bimodal distribution of colors for these objects as well as detecting correlations between colors and orbital elements. From our survey, it appears red Centaurs have a broader color distribution than gray Centaurs. We find red Centaurs have a smaller orbital inclination angle distribution than gray Centaurs at the 99.3% confidence level. Furthermore, we find that our entire sample of KBOs and Centaurs exhibits bimodal colors at the
confidence level. KBOs and Centaurs with H
V
> 7.0 have bimodal colors at the 99.96% confidence level and KBOs with H
V
< 6.0 have bimodal colors at the 96% confidence level.
As a result of our continuing photometric survey, we report here optical colors for 36 Kuiper Belt objects, increasing our sample size to 91 objects. We find that certain dynamical classes of objects exhibit distinctive colors-21 out of 21 objects on small-inclination and small-eccentricity orbits with perihelion distances larger than 40 AU exhibit red surface colors (BϪ ), while 17 out of 20 objects on large-inclination and large-R 1 1.5 eccentricity orbits with aphelion distances larger than 70 AU exhibit gray surface colors (BϪ ). Our R ! 1.5 observations are consistent with a primordial origin for Kuiper Belt surface colors, if we assume that gray objects formed closer to the Sun than red objects, and as Neptune migrated outward it scattered gray objects onto dynamically hot orbits. By this model, the contrasting dynamically cold and red objects beyond 40 AU remained far enough away from Neptune that they were never perturbed by the planet.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.