Water-ice driven activity on Main-Belt Comet P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) ?

Abstract

The dust ejecta of Main-Belt Comet P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) have been observed with several telescopes at the at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, Spain. Application of an inverse dust tail Monte Carlo method to the images of the dust ejecta from the object indicates that a sustained, likely water-ice driven, activity over some eight months is the mechanism responsible for the formation of the observed tail. The total amount of dust released is estimated to be 5E7 kg, which represents about 0.3% of the nucleus mass. While the event could have been triggered by a collision, this cannot be decided from the currently available data.

Accepted for ApJ Letters

References in corpus (1)

• The USNO-B Catalog

Cited by in corpus (22)

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• Characterization of Active Main Belt Object P/2012 F5 (Gibbs): A Possible Impacted Asteroid
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• Anisotropic Ejection from Active Asteroid P/2010 A2: An Implication of Impact Shattering on an Asteroid
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• Search for the Return of Activity in Active Asteroid 176P/LINEAR
• Multiband Optical Observation of P/2010 A2 Dust Tail
• Pre-Discovery Observations of Disrupting Asteroid P/2010 A2
• Model for Asteroid Regolith to Guide Simulant Development