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Beyond Point Masses. III. Detecting Haumea’s Nonspherical Gravitational Field

  • Authors: Benjamin C. N. Proudfoot, Darin A. Ragozzine, William Giforos, Will M. Grundy, Mariah MacDonald, William J. Oldroyd

Benjamin C. N. Proudfoot et al 2024 The Planetary Science Journal 5 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 1.

A corner plot for the HST-only orbit fit to the Haumea system. We include all 18 fitted parameters along with two derived parameters. To facilitate easy interpretation, we list J 2 rather than J 2 R 2 by taking the volumetric radius R from the occultation-derived shape model (Ortiz et al. 2017). We also show the inclinations of each satellite with respect to Haumea’s equator in the last two columns. Along the top of each column is the marginal posterior distribution for each parameter in our fit. Below the marginal distributions are the two-dimensional joint posterior distributions for every pair of parameters. Contours correspond to 1, 2, and 3σ levels. Small black points mark individual samples from our Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) chains. The best-fit parameter set in our MCMC chains corresponds to a χ 2 of 99.1 with 90 degrees of freedom. Of particular note is the strong exclusion of J 2 = 0 in the marginal posterior for Haumea’s J 2, alongside strong correlations between J 2 and a variety of other parameters.

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