Lingering grains of truth around comet 17P/Holmes

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 $\pm$ 0.610 km, 0.03 $\pm$ 0.01 and 1.03 $\pm$ 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 $\pm$ 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 $\mu$m and a few cm in radius. The trail mass was $\sim$ 1.2 - 5.3 $\times$ 10${}^{10}$ kg.

arXiv commentAccepted to ApJ. 2 tables, 4 figures

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• 2014-2015 Multiple Outbursts of 15P/Finlay
• Detection of Remnant Dust Cloud Associated with the 2007 Outburst of 17P/Holmes
• Monitoring Observations of the Jupiter-Family Comet 17P/Holmes during 2014 Perihelion Passage
• The NEOWISE-Discovered Comet Population and the CO+CO2 production rates