Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.0808f&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #08.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1084
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
3
Scientific paper
Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann1 was observed with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and the Faint Object Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope on March 11-12, 1996 UT. During the observations the comet was in strong outburst, R magnitude ~ 12.5 in a 5'' radius. The outburst was primarily on the day side of the comet. A time series of WFPC2 images shows the dust moving away from the nucleus with an expansion velocity of 0.15+/- 0.05 km s^{-1}. Consistent outflow velocities were derived from pairs of images taken ~ 0.5 hour and ~ 20 hours apart. The shape of the azimuthal average of the comet in the later images indicates the outburst started on March 10 between 4 and 13 hours UT, increased to a production rate that it maintained for ~ 12 hours and then tapered off toward the quiescent production rate. During the period of constant production the outburst had an intensity distribution matching rho (-(1.04+/-0.02)) , where rho is the cometocentric distance projected onto the sky. Assuming 30% of the flux in the peak pixel of an unsaturated image was due to sunlight reflected from the nucleus and using a geometric albedo of 0.04, we derive an approximate size for the nucleus of 39 km. From FOS spectra (total exposure time of 58.5 minutes) taken about 40 hours after the initial outburst we place a 3sigma upper limit on the brightness of the OH A(2Sigma ^+) --X(2Sigma ^+) (0,0) band of 24 Rayleighs implying {Q}H_2O <= 3x10^28 s^{-1}. GHRS spectra (87 minutes total exposure time) taken about 47 hours after the outburst began showed no CO Fourth Positive (A(1Pi ) --X(1Sigma ^+) ) system emission, yielding {Q}CO <= 9x1028 s^{-1}.
A'Hearn Michael F.
Feldman Paul D.
McPhate Jason B.
Tozzi Gian Paolo
Weaver Harold A.
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