Related papers: The Active Asteroids
Some asteroids eject dust, producing transient, comet-like comae and tails; these are the active asteroids. The causes of activity in this newly-identified population are many and varied. They include impact ejection and disruption,…
Asteroid (3200) Phaethon, a B-type asteroid, has been active during its perihelion passages. This asteroid is considered to be a source of the Geminid meteor stream. It is reported that this asteroid is spinning at a rotation period of…
Observations of active asteroid P/2017 S5 when near perihelion reveal the ejection of large (0.1 to 10 mm) particles at 0.2 to 2 m/s speeds, with estimated mass-loss rates of a few kg/s. The protracted nature of the mass loss (continuous…
Solar system bodies with surface and sub-surface volatiles will show observational evidence of activity when they reach a temperature where those volatiles change from solid to gas and are released. This is most frequently seen in comets,…
The study of active asteroids has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years since the recognition of main-belt comets (which orbit in the main asteroid belt, but exhibit comet-like activity due to the sublimation of volatile ices)…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
The asteroids are primitive solar system bodies which evolve both collisionally and through disruptions due to rapid rotation [1]. These processes can lead to the formation of binary asteroids [2-4] and to the release of dust [5], both…
The asteroid (3200) Phaethon is known to be the parent body of the Geminids, although meteor showers are commonly associated with the activity of periodic comets. What is most peculiar to the asteroid is its comet-like activity in the…
Active asteroids show (typically transient) cometary activity, driven by a range of processes. A sub-set, sometimes called main-belt comets, may be driven by sublimation and so could be useful for tracing the present-day distribution of…
A long-term sublimation model to explain how Phaethon could provide the Geminid stream is proposed. We find that it would take $\sim6$ Myr or more for Phaethon to lose all of its internal ice (if ever there was) in its present orbit. Thus,…
Near-Earth asteroid (3200) Phaethon is an active asteroid with a dust tail repeatedly observed over the past decade for 3 days during each perihelion passage down to a heliocentric distance of 0.14 au. The mechanism causing the activity is…
Periodic comets of different dynamical groups with orbits at 2 - 5 AU still occasionally active. The observed dust activity of such objects can be connected with processes of water ice sublimation (MBCs) or crystallization of amorphous…
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…
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
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…
Comets can exhibit non-gravitational accelerations caused by recoil forces due to anisotropic mass loss. So might active asteroids. We present an astrometric investigation of 18 active asteroids in search of non-gravitational acceleration.…
Most main-belt asteroids are primitive rock and metal bodies in orbit about the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Disruption, through high velocity collisions or rotational spin-up, is believed to be the primary mechanism for the production and…
Whenever a freely spinning body is found in a complex rotational state, this means that either the body is a recent victim of an impact or a tidal interaction, or is a fragment of a recently disrupted progenitor. Another factor (relevant…
Previously unknown asteroid P/2010 A2 rose to prominence in 2010 by forming a transient, comet-like tail consisting of ejected dust. The observed dust production was interpreted as either the result of a hypervelocity impact with a smaller…
The $\sim$4 km diameter main belt asteroid 6478 Gault has ejected dust intermittently since at least 2013. The character of the emission, including its episodic nature and the low speed of the ejected particles ($V \sim $ 0.15 m s$^{-1}$),…