Searching for Main-Belt Comets Using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey

Abstract

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey, specifically the Very Wide segment of data, is used to search for possible main-belt comets. In the first data set, 952 separate objects with asteroidal orbits within the main-belt are examined using a three-level technique. First, the full-width-half-maximum of each object is compared to stars of similar magnitude, to look for evidence of a coma. Second, the brightness profiles of each object are compared with three stars of the same magnitude, which are nearby on the image to ensure any extended profile is not due to imaging variations. Finally, the star profiles are subtracted from the asteroid profile and the residuals are compared with the background using an unpaired T-test. No objects in this survey show evidence of cometary activity. The second survey includes 11438 objects in the main-belt, which are examined visually. One object, an unknown comet, is found to show cometary activity. Its motion is consistent with being a main-belt asteroid, but the observed arc is too short for a definitive orbit calculation. No other body in this survey shows evidence of cometary activity. Upper limits of the number of weakly and strongly active main-belt comets are derived to be 630+/-77 and 87+/-28, respectively. These limits are consistent with those expected from asteroid collisions. In addition, data extracted from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope image archive of main-belt comet 176P/LINEAR is presented.

16 pages, 1 table, 5 figures; Accepted by Icarus

References in corpus (4)

• The Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey - Full Data Release: The orbital structure of the Kuiper belt
• The Orbital and Absolute Magnitude Distributions of Main Belt Asteroids
• The CFEPS Kuiper Belt Survey: Strategy and Pre-survey Results
• Evidence for a colour dependence in the size distribution of main belt asteroids

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• The Hawaii Trails Project: Comet-Hunting in the Main Asteroid Belt
• SAFARI: Searching Asteroids For Activity Revealing Indicators
• Limits on the Size and Orbit Distribution of Main Belt Comets
• Main-belt comets in the Palomar Transient Factory survey: I. The search for extendedness
• The activity of Main Belt comets
• The Nucleus of Main-Belt Comet P/2010 R2 (La Sagra)
• Where are the Mini Kreutz-family Comets?
• A Targeted Search for Main Belt Comets
• Main-belt comets: sublimation-driven activity in the asteroid belt
• Main-belt comets as tracers of ice in the inner Solar system
• Secular light curves of 25 members of the Themis family of asteroids, suspected of exhibiting low level cometary activity
• Constraints on Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami
• Secular Light Curves of NEAs 2201 Oljato, 3200 Phaethon, 99942 Apophis, 162173 Ryugu, 495848, and 6063 Jason
• A Dedicated Lunar Trojan Asteroid Survey with Small Ground-Based Telescopes