A Search of Reactivated Comets
- Creators
-
Ye, Quan-Zhi
Abstract
Dormant or near-dormant short-period comets can unexpectedly regain the ability to eject dust. In many known cases, the resurrection is short-lived and lasts less than one orbit. However, it is possible that some resurrected comets can remain active in later perihelion passages. We search the archival images of various facilities to look for these "reactivated" comets. We identify two candidates, 297P/Beshore and 332P/Ikeya–Murakami, both of which were found to be inactive or weakly active in the previous orbit before their discovery. We derive a reactivation rate of ~ 0.007 comet^(-1), orbit^(-1), which implies that typical short-period comets only become temporarily dormant a few times or less. Smaller comets are prone to rotational instability and may undergo temporary dormancy more frequently. Next generation high-cadence surveys may find more reactivation events of these comets.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 January 1. Accepted 2017 March 16. Published 2017 April 13. I thank an anonymous referee and Man-To Hui for helpful comments, David Clark for discussion about archival data search, Davide Farnocchia and Gareth Williams for discussion about the validity of the pre-discovery observations, as well as Eric Christensen and Robert Seaman for their help with the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) and Siding Spring Survey (SSS) data. I also thank the support of the GROWTH project, funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1545949. The SkyMorph service was developed under NASA's Applied Information Systems Research (AISR) program. The Solar System Object Search service is hosted at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre operated by the National Research Council of Canada with the support of the Canadian Space Agency. The pre-discovery image of 297P/Beshore was obtained from the Isaac Newton Group Archive which is maintained as part of the CASU Astronomical Data Centre at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. The SSS survey was operated by the CSS in collaboration with the Australian National University. The CSS/SSS surveys are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX15AF79G-NEOO, issued through the Science Mission Directorate's Near Earth Object Observations Program. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.Attached Files
Published - Ye_2017_AJ_153_207.pdf
Submitted - 1703.06997.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 76552
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170413-121030231
- OISE-1545949
- NSF
- NNX15AF79G-NEOO
- NASA
- Created
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2017-04-13Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field