What is the Parent of Cometary O (1S)?

Details What is the Parent of Cometary O (1S)? What is the Parent of Cometary O (1S)?

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.2005c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #20.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.516

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The optical spectrum of comets consists mostly of emission features attributable to molecular radicals. There are also a few atomic lines, including three of oxygen: the red O (1D) doublet and the green O (1S) line. These three lines arise from atoms produced directly in the excited 1S and 1D states by photodissociation of their parent (as "prompt” emission). The lifetimes of these transitions are short ( 150 sec and 1 sec respectively for the 1D and 1S states) so that they decay before they have time to travel far, making them excellent tracers of their parents’ outflow. The red doublet is relatively easy to detect at high spectral resolution since it occurs in a spectral region which has few lines. H2O appears to be the parent and grandparent of the red doublet. The green line occurs at 5577.339Å, in the middle of the strong C2 (1,2) band, and thus has seldom been observed. Cochran and Cochran (2001) observed the green line in spectra of Comet C/1999 S4 (LINEAR) along with the red doublet. Those observations were consistent with the production of the green line from H2O based on the line strengths. However, comparison of the red and green line widths suggested that there must be an additional parent for the O (1S) line. In this talk, we will summarize the existing observations and we will discuss new observations of comet 9P/Tempel 1 which were obtained using the Keck HIRES spectrograph during the impact of the comet with the Deep Impact spacecraft. These observations were used to trace the increase and decay of emission from O (1S) and OH as a function of time after the impact. A comparison of these two species offers interesting constraints to the question of the parent of the O (1S).

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