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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 2(787), p. 116, 2014

DOI: 10.1088/0004-637x/787/2/116

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Lingering grains of truth around comet 17P/Holmes

Journal article published in 2014 by R. Stevenson, J. M. Bauer, E. A. Kramer, T. Grav, A. K. Mainzer, J. R. Masiero ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Postprint: archiving forbidden
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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

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