Is the Tail of 73P-B/Schwassman-Wachman 1 Chasing its Remnant Nucleus?

Details Is the Tail of 73P-B/Schwassman-Wachman 1 Chasing its Remnant Nucleus? Is the Tail of 73P-B/Schwassman-Wachman 1 Chasing its Remnant Nucleus?

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.1207w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #12.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.504

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We report on imaging observations of comets 73P-B/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 and 73P-C/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 at the IRTF with SpeX (J, K) and MIRSI (10 micron narrow band filter set) on 2006 Apr 17-19 UT and 2006 Jun 18-19, and at the VLT with VISIR (10 micron narrow band filters, 20 micron) on 2006 Apr 17 UT.
Compared to when the comet was in the midst of breaking up in mid-April, in June the tail of 73P-B is much fainter and there is a compact coma detected well separated and ahead of its tail, and fainter than the tail. The width of the tail in J, K, and 10 micron images indicates that the pieces that were shed in April must still be outgassing and releasing small particles into the tail-shaped coma; small grains have relatively short lifetimes in the coma due to radiation pressure. The trailing tail is now well separated from the faint "leader of the pack" compact coma that we suppose is a remaining piece of the nucleus. It will be interesting to see post-perihelion if this "leading compact coma" object continues to gain distance on the debris and continues to weakly outgas and shed small grains. One wonders if it expended its volatiles (available to the surface) in breaking up; a short-lived release of volatiles occurred in the Deep Impact event with comet 9P/Tempel 1 (e.g., Sugita et al. 2005; Harker et al. 2005, 2006).
73P-C is extended with a more elongated coma structure closer to perihelion compared to 2006 Apr 18-19 UT. The SEDs from 2006 Apr and Jun from SpeX-MIRSI (IRTF) are compared with VISIR (VLT) SEDs from 2006 Apr. Information on the heliocentric dependence of the activity and dust release yields insights into the origin of activity and the relationship between activity and grain size distributions/mineralogy.

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