Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9: an active comet

Details Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9: an active comet Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9: an active comet

Oct 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997p%26ss...45.1271r&link_type=abstract

Planetary and Space Science, Volume 45, Issue 10, p. 1271-1277.

Physics

1

Scientific paper

The important elements of the debate over the activity versus dormancy of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (S-L 9) are reviewed. It is argued that the circularity of the isophotes in the inner comae of S-L 9 as well as the spatial dependencies of the comae brightness profiles are indicators of sustained dust production by S-L 9. It is also shown that the westward tail orientations, which were formerly interpreted as a sign of the comet's dormancy, are not a good indicator of either activity or dormancy. Rather, the tail orientations simply place constraints on the dust production rate for grains smaller than ~ 5 μm. All the available evidence points to S-L 9 as having been an active, dust-producing comet. Synthetic images of an active comet are fitted to Hubble Space Telescope images of the S-L 9 fragment K, and its grain size and outflow velocity distributions are extracted. These findings show that the appearance of the dust coma was dominated by large grains having radii between ~ 30 μm and ~ 3 mm, produced at a rate of M ~ 22 kg s-1, and ejected at outflow velocities of ~ 0.5 m s-1. Only upper limits on the production rates of smaller grains are obtained. The nucleus of fragment K was not observed directly but its size is restricted to lie within a rather narrow interval 0.4<~Rf<~1.2 km.

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