American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 2(787), p. 116, 2014
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637x/787/2/116
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Comet 17P/Holmes underwent a massive outburst in 2007 Oct., brightening by a factor of almost a million in under 48 hours. We used infrared images taken by the Wide-Field Survey Explorer mission to characterize the comet as it appeared at a heliocentric distance of 5.1 AU almost 3 years after the outburst. The comet appeared to be active with a coma and dust trail along the orbital plane. We constrained the diameter, albedo, and beaming parameter of the nucleus to 4.135 $±$ 0.610 km, 0.03 $±$ 0.01 and 1.03 $±$ 0.21, respectively. The properties of the nucleus are consistent with those of other Jupiter Family comets. The best-fit temperature of the coma was 134 $±$ 11 K, slightly higher than the blackbody temperature at that heliocentric distance. Using Finson-Probstein modeling we found that the morphology of the trail was consistent with ejection during the 2007 outburst and was made up of dust grains between 250 $μ$m and a few cm in radius. The trail mass was $∼$ 1.2 - 5.3 $\times$ 10$^{10}$ kg. ; Comment: Accepted to ApJ. 2 tables, 4 figures