ISudden brightness enhancements on main-belt objects

Dust ejection activities have been discovered from a few tens of asteroids since the first confirmation in 2006. Those objects are known as active asteroids. They provide good observational chances to study ongoing phenomena in the solar system such as sublimation of icy volatiles, mutual collisions among asteroids, rotational disintegrations, thermal fatigue, etc. Although dust ejection mechanisms of individual cases have been investigated through observations, the frequencies of the events and their connection to the overall evolutionary budget of the solar system have not yet been studied thoroughly, mainly because previous studies were based on serendipitous discoveries without any systematic surveys of these objects. In this work, we made wide-field monitoring observations of asteroids using Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) during the 2018/2019 winter season. Among 3,644 asteroids in the field-of-view, we detected nine candidates of brightness enhancements which we suspect as possible activities. It is still possible that some of those brightness increases have caused by long-term rotations. However, our observed frequency and brightness enhancements size-frequency distribution agrees with the expectations from impacts with decimeter sized objects, when the main belt objects size-frequency distribution observed down to decameter sized bodies are extrapolated to decimeter size.