Measuring The Effect Of Collisional Acceleration In The Coma Of Active Comets: Study Of The CN And C2 Radial Distributions And Production Rates In Comet C/1995O1 (Hale-Bopp)

Details Measuring The Effect Of Collisional Acceleration In The Coma Of Active Comets: Study Of The CN And C2 Radial Distributions And Production Rates In Comet C/1995O1 (Hale-Bopp) Measuring The Effect Of Collisional Acceleration In The Coma Of Active Comets: Study Of The CN And C2 Radial Distributions And Production Rates In Comet C/1995O1 (Hale-Bopp)

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.1502h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #15.02

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Highly active comets offer a challenging environment for measuring the gas production rate using traditional techniques. The problem arises from photo-dissociation of water that occurs within the collisionally thick regions of the coma. The excess energy of the dissociation is thermalized into the background coma, resulting in an accelerating flow that is both variable with cometocentric distance and higher than ballistic models predict. The clearest case for collisional modification of outflow comes from C/1995O1 (Hale-Bopp). With a production rate exceeding Qwater=1031 s-1, this object had a collision sphere twice as broad as the water scale length. Observations of OH were shown to conform to the accelerating model, both in terms of the radial extent of the emission and in the predicted average velocities over summed areas of the inner and outer coma . These data also showed evidence for mass loading of pickup ions in the collision sphere that took the form of a generally slow acceleration rate and an asymmetry in the shape of the neutral coma at large distances from the nucleus. However, the reliance of this work on a single species left meant that the spatial extent of the emission could not be fully decoupled from an extended gas source acting in addition to or instead of collisions. In this presentation we provide a new analysis of the radial extent and azimuthal symmetry of two additional species (CN and C2 in the coma of Hale-Bopp. Each shows evidence of similar spatial extension and azimuthal shape when compared with OH. Furthermore, by assuming the common velocity of a bulk flow defined by OH and water, we are able to use the Hale-Bopp coma shape to refine our understanding of the scale lengths of the CN and C2 parents and to obtain more precise estimates of the production rates.

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