English

Investigating the Temperature Distribution of Diatomic Carbon in Comets using the Swan Bands

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-01-08 v1

Abstract

We present high spectral-resolution observations of comets 122P/de Vico and 153P/Ikeya-Zhang obtained with the Tull Coud\'{e} spectrograph on the 2.7m Harlan J. Smith telescope of McDonald Observatory. We used these data to study the distribution of the lines of the d3Πga3Πu\mathrm{d} ^3\Pi_g - \mathrm{a} ^3\Pi_u C2_2 (Swan) bands. We show that the data are best represented with two rotational temperatures, with the lowest energy lines being at a relatively cool temperature and the higher energy lines being at a higher temperature. We discuss the implications of this two temperature distribution and suggest future work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.03688,
  title  = {Investigating the Temperature Distribution of Diatomic Carbon in Comets using the Swan Bands},
  author = {Tyler Nelson and Anita Cochran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.03688},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

15 pages, 8 figures