The Age-Dependence of the Detectabiity of Comets Orbiting Solar-Type Stars

Abstract

The outflows from comets in orbit around G-type main-sequence stars can be detected when they produce transient OH absorption lines in the spectrum near 3100 Angstroms of the host star. There is only about a 3 X 10^{-8} probability of detecting an analog to comet Hale-Bopp orbiting an analog to the Sun. However, for young solar-type stars with very large numbers of comets, possibly delivering water to terrestrial planets, there is as much as a 1% chance that any sufficiently sensitive, randomly-timed observation may detect such transient absorption.

6 pages, 1 figure, accepted by ApJ

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• The Spitzer Space Telescope Mission
• New debris disk candidates: 24 micron stellar excesses at 100 Myr

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