The Distribution of Main Belt Asteroids with Featureless Spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometry

In this work, we propose to analyse the existence of possible correlations between the taxonomic classes of asteroids showing featureless spectra -i.e. a flat continuum with no absorption bands- and their orbital properties. We compute the mean spectral slope of 14 753 asteroids using the photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky survey Moving Objects Catalog (SDSS-MOC4). Although the quality of these data is not comparable in resolution to the spectroscopic data, the amount of observations in the SDSS-MOC4 is more than 20 times larger that in the available spectral databases. This allows us to obtain a statistically significant result.