Presently, the number of known asteroids is more than 710,000. Knowledge of size and albedo is essential in many aspects of asteroid research, such as the chemical composition and mineralogy, the size-frequency distribution of dynamical families, and the relationship between small bodies in the outer solar system or comets. Recently, based on the infrared all-sky survey data obtained by IRAS, AKARI, and WISE, the large asteroid catalogs containing size and albedo data have been constructed. In this paper, we discuss the compositional distribution in the main belt regions based on the compiled data on size, albedo, and separately obtained taxonomic type information.

Quasars are among the farthest and brightest objects known in the universe. Because quasars are mostly observed in the redshift range between 1 and 3, they can be used to study large scale structure in the universe, and its evolution over the past billion years. An important issue is the evolution of the quasar luminosity function, which has been investigated for relative small samples of the 2QZ catalog. Here we extend the study to 3 quasar samples, the most recent data of the Milliquas, Master and 2QZ quasar catalogs to determine the luminosity function of quasars and its evolution, using the Standard cosmological ΛCDM model with ΩΛ = 0.73, ΩM = 0.27, and H0 = 70kms-1Mpc-1. For the purpose of this analysis we initially used 0.25-mag bins and approximately 0.180-redshift bins, then calculated the comoving distance and comoving volume for each bin of redshift and calculated the number of objects in each bin per unit volume, in order to find the number density per absolute magnitude bin. Our analysis on the basis of these new and much more complete datasets is largely in agreement with earlier studies of the luminosity evolution of quasars.