Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.1326l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #13.26; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1058
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Asteroid (3200) Phaethon is widely recognized as the parent of the Geminid meteor stream. However, it has never shown evidence for on-going mass loss or for any form of comet-like activity that would indicate the continued replenishment of the stream. Following an alert by Battams and Watson (IAU Circular 9054, 2009), we used NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft to image Phaethon in the period UT 2009 June 17 - 22, when the heliocentric distance was near 0.14 AU. The resulting photometry shows an unexpected brightening, by a factor of two, starting UT 2009 June 20.2+/-0.2 which we interpret as an impulsive release of dust particles from Phaethon. If the mean particle radius is near 1-mm and the density near 2500 kg m-3, then the emitted dust particles must have a combined mass of about 2.5X10**8 kg. This is approximately 1/10,000 of the Geminid stream mass. To replenish the stream within its estimated 1000 yr lifetime would require about 10 events like the one observed, per orbit. Phaethon is too hot for water ice to survive, rendering unlikely the possibility that dust is ejected through gas-drag from sublimated ice. Instead, we suggest that Phaethon's small perihelion distance may indirectly lead both to the production of dust (through thermal fracture and decomposition cracking of hydrated minerals) and to its ejection into interplanetary space (through radiation pressure sweeping).
Jewitt David
Li Jing
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