13 papers
A Look at Eight Outbursts of Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke
Ky Huynh, Michael S. P. Kelley, Jessica M. Sunshine +6
Cometary outbursts may be used as a means to infer the physical processes occurring on cometary nuclei. To that end, we studied eight outbursts of comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke identified…
Coma Physics of an Interstellar Object: JWST Spatial-Spectral Mapping of 3I/ATLAS
Nathan X. Roth, Martin A. Cordiner, Stefanie N. Milam +17
We report a survey of molecular emission from cometary volatiles using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) toward interstellar object 3I/ATLAS carried out on UT 2025 December 22…
Bayesian Modeling of NICER Cometary X-ray Spectra: A Legacy Survey of Solar-Wind Charge Exchange
T. K. Deskins, Dennis Bodewits, Steven Bromley +3
We present a uniform, epoch-resolved analysis of soft X-ray observations of eight comets obtained with NICER, using Bayesian statistics to identify charge-exchange line components,…
Origin and evolution of NiI and FeI in the coma of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS throughout its trajectory
Damien Hutsemékers, Jean Manfroid, Cyrielle Opitom +8
We present high-resolution UVES+VLT observations of neutral nickel and iron atoms in the coma of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS taken after perihelion. Metal emission was strong s…
Characterization of the Volatile Properties of 133P/Elst-Pizarro and Other Main-Belt Comets with JWST and Ground-Based Observations
Henry H. Hsieh, John W. Noonan, Michael S. P. Kelley +10
We report results from an analysis of the volatile composition and evolution of main-belt comet (MBC) 133P/Elst-Pizarro using JWST NIRSpec and NIRCam observations and ground-based…
Emerging Diversity Among the Main-Belt Comets: Insights from JWST and Ground-Based Observations of 457P/Lemmon-PANSTARRS
John W. Noonan, Henry H. Hsieh, Michael S. P. Kelley +10
We present JWST NIRSpec and NIRCam observations of 457P/Lemmon-PANSTARRS, a main-belt comet that displayed activity around its 2020 perihelion and that was observed to regain activ…