Current meteor production of comet P/Swift-Tuttle 1992t

Details Current meteor production of comet P/Swift-Tuttle 1992t Current meteor production of comet P/Swift-Tuttle 1992t

Dec 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994a%26a...292..304f&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 292, no. 1, p. 304-310

Statistics

Computation

5

Comets, Computational Astrophysics, Grain Size, Interplanetary Dust, Meteoroid Showers, Meteorology, Satellite Imagery, Astronomical Models, Mathematical Models, Monte Carlo Method, Size Distribution, Time Dependence

Scientific paper

Two wide-field Schmidt images of the dust tail of comet P/Swift-Tuttle 1992t are analyzed by means of the inverse Monte-Carlo model of dust tails. The model allows to infer the dust environment on a limited time interval and on a time-dependent size interval: from 0.1 mm to 10 mm five months before perihelion, and from 5 microns to 500 microns a month before. Only a dust production involving all of the sunward hemisphere can account for the tail shape, in agreement with the wide thrust angles of dust ejection from the nucleus active spots and cracks found by Sekanina (1981). If the mass loss rate is dominated by large grains, our result is compatible with a mass loss rate proportional to the inverse square of the heliocentric distance. Our results on the size distribution suggest that this is the case, because the power index of the time-averaged distribution is -3.3 +/- 0.2 for dust diameters between 5 microns and 3 mm. Therefore the dust production is dominated by millimeter-sized grains, really Perseids at their birth. For pre-perihelion times, the lower limit of meteor production of P/Swift-Tuttle 1992t is 7 1010 kg, (90 +/- 10)% of which was injected into the Perseid stream.

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