Bibcode
Kelley, Michael S.; Fernández, Y. R.; Reach, W. T.; Lisse, C. M.; A'Hearn, M. F.; Bauer, J. M.; Campins, H.; Fitzsimmons, A.; Groussin, O.; Lamy, P. L.; Licandro, J.; Lowry, S. C.; Meech, K. J.; Pittichova, J.; Toth, I.; Weaver, H. A.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #54.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.525
Advertised on:
10
2007
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
A Survey of Ensemble Physical Properties of Cometary Nuclei (SEPPCoN) is
underway to characterize the nuclei of 100 Jupiter-family comets (JFC).
The survey combines both visible and mid-infrared observations to
measure the JFC size and albedo distributions. We inspected Spitzer
Space Telescope MIPS and IRS images of the survey targets for dust
comae, tails, and trails. Out of 98 observed comets, we found 32 to have
some emission from dust outside of the central point source. A few of
these sources were also observed to have dust in visible, ground-based
data. The heliocentric distances (rh) of the 32 targets range from 3.5
to 6.5 AU, with most between 4 and 5 AU. We derive color-temperatures
for the 20 dust detections observed in both the 16 and 22 micron IRS
cameras and find the color-temperature approximately varies as
280*rh^(-0.5) [K], as expected for isothermal low-albedo dust in local
thermodynamic equilibrium. We discuss the evidence for outliers from
this trend. We compare our observations to dust syndynes and
3-dimensional dust models to distinguish dust trails from dust tails.
Unlike dust tails, dust trails only weakly respond to solar radiation
pressure and, therefore, likely represent the largest (> 1 mm) grains
ejected from the nucleus. We also compare observations to model images
in order to determine the extent of recent coma activity. Water
sublimation is expected to be greatly extinguished on comet surfaces by
3.5 AU. Dust structures observed outside of this rh could arise from
recent coma activity (timescales up to weeks) caused by the sublimation
of highly volatile ices (such as CO2) or the crystallization of
amorphous water ice. Alternatively, the observed dust may be slowly
dispersing grains ejected at a much earlier epoch (timescales up to
years) when water sublimation dominated coma activity.