Searching for Gas Emission through Visible Spectroscopy of Large Perihelia (>5AU) Comets

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Scientific paper

We present spectroscopic observations of several comets with perihelia beyond 5 AU. In recent years many large perihelia comets have been discovered with active dust comae. The gas, which must be driving the dust production, is rarely detected. These objects are not close enough to the sun for water sublimation to be responsible for coma production, so sublimation of other volatiles (CO, CO2) or phase changes in water-ice likely drive the activity. They represent a class of comets less altered from their original states than those that regularly pass through the water sublimation zone and therefore can be used to address questions of cometary composition and disentangle evolutionary effects.
We used the LRIS spectrometer (0.3 Å spectral resolution) on the Keck 10 m telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii in hopes of detecting fluorescence from some of the commonly observed visible gas species such as CN, C2 or CO+. Our targets were three Centaurs - 95P/Chiron, 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 and C/ 2001 M10 (NEAT) - and one long-period comet - C/2003 O1 (LINEAR). We present upper limits of gas species production rates and the gas-to-dust mass loss ratio.

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