Related papers: The activity of Main Belt comets

We present a series of observations of the return of activity in main-belt comet 238P/Read. Using data obtained in July and August 2010 when 238P appeared to be largely inactive, we find best-fit IAU phase function parameters of…

Small bodies in the solar system are conventionally classified into asteroids and comets. However, it is recently found that a small number of objects can exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets. Some are more consistent with…

There is a group of newly recognized asteroids in the main belt that are exhibiting cometary characteristics. We will call them Asteroidal Belt Comets or ABCs. An analysis of their orbital and physical properties has resulted in the…

In this paper we apply different methods to examine the possibility that a small group of 24 asteroids dynamically linked to main-belt comet P/2006 VW139, recently discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope, shares a common physical…

Comets are primitive objects that formed in the protoplanetary disk, and have been largely preserved over the history of the Solar System. However, they are not pristine, and surfaces of cometary nuclei do evolve. In order to understand the…

The so-called "early activity" of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been observed to originate mostly in parts of the concave region or "neck" between its two lobes. Since activity is driven by the sublimation of volatiles, this is a…

The Centaurs are recent escapees from the Kuiper belt that are destined either to meet fiery oblivion in the hot inner regions of the Solar system or to be ejected to the interstellar medium by gravitational scattering from the giant…

We perform statistical wavelet analysis of the Main Belt asteroids, seeking statistically significant asteroid families. The goal is to test the new wavelet analysis algorithm and to compare its results with more traditional methods like…

Metallic bodies that were the cores of differentiated bodies are sources of iron meteorites and are considered to have formed early in the terrestrial planet region before migrating to the main asteroid belt. Surface temperatures and mutual…

We review the current state of knowledge of the long-term evolution of the small bodies that give rise to comets and exocomets, as well as their reservoirs. The active cometary phase is only transitory, and bodies that become comets pass…

One of the common approximations in long-term evolution studies of small bodies is the use of circular orbits averaging the actual eccentric ones, facilitating the coupling of processes with very different timescales, such as the orbital…

We use a quasi 3-D thermal evolution model for a spherical comet nucleus, which takes into account the diurnal and latitudinal variation of the solar flux, but neglects lateral heat conduction. We model the thermal evolution and activity of…

We propose a chemical and dynamical process to explain the surface colors of the Kuiper belt. In our hypothesis, the initial bulk compositions of the bodies themselves can be quite diverse -- as is seen in comets -- but the early surface…

Non-resolved thermal infrared observations enable studies of thermal and physical properties of asteroid surfaces provided the shape and rotational properties of the target are well determined via thermo-physical models. We used…

The practical distinctions between asteroids and comets, viewed as products of accretion on either side of the snow line, are less clear-cut than previously understood. In this chapter, we discuss the numerous solar system populations which…

We investigate the brightening behavior of long-period comets as a function of dynamical age, defined by the original reciprocal semimajor axis, $1/a_0$. Our goal is to test long-standing claims about comet behavior using a large number of…

Active galactic nuclei are clearly heating gas in `cooling flows'. The effectiveness and spatial distribution of the heating are controversial. We use three-dimensional simulations on adaptive grids to study the impact on a cooling flow of…

We study the activity evolution of the main-belt comet 324P/La Sagra over time and the properties of its emitted dust. We performed aperture photometry on images taken by a wide range of telescopes at optical and thermal infrared…

Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…

A body dissipates energy when it freely rotates about any axis different from principal. This entails relaxation, i.e., decrease of the rotational energy, with the angular momentum preserved. The spin about the major-inertia axis…