Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.1620s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #16.20; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.415
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
1
Scientific paper
Numerous sets of narrowband filter photometry were obtained for Comets 17P/Holmes and 8P/Tuttle from Lowell and Perth Observatories during the interval of November 2007 to April 2008. Our Holmes observations began 1 week following its extreme outburst, at which time the measured water production rate was 5x1029 and the derived proxy of dust production, Afrho, was about 5x105. An exponential decay in measured production rates was observed for all species, with each species dropping by factors of about 200-500 after 125 days. Gas species all exhibited clear and similar trends with aperture size, with large apertures yielding larger production rates, qualitatively consistent with the strong decrease of outgassing with time. This probably implies that the bulk of fresh volatiles were confined to the nucleus and near-nucleus regime, rather than from ice in the ejecta cloud. The much larger aperture trends observed in dust Afrho values are consistent with dust having lower velocities and longer effective lifetimes than the gas species.
Comet Tuttle exhibits a strong pre-/post-perihelion asymmetry in production rates. At a heliocentric distance of 1.4 AU, production rates were about 4x greater outbound as compared to inbound. This strong seasonal effect implies one or more strong source regions began to "turn on" shortly prior to perihelion, presumably associated with a significant obliquity of the rotation axis. These and other results will be presented.
This research is supported by NASA's Planetary Astronomy Program.
Bair Allison N.
Schleicher David G.
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