Related papers: Main-Belt Comet P/2012 T1 (PANSTARRS)
Most Kreutz family sungrazing comets are discovered only days before perihelion, severely limiting observational opportunities to study their physical nature and decay. Kreutz sungrazer C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) was discovered a month before…
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…
An explosion on comet 17P/Holmes occurred on 2007 Oct 23, projecting particulate debris of a wide range of sizes into the interplanetary medium. We observed the comet using the Spitzer spectrograph on 2007 Nov 10 and 2008 Feb 27, and the…
Comet C/2002 S2, a member of the Kreutz family of Sungrazing comets, was discovered in white light images of the SOHO/LASCO coronagraph on 2002 September 18 and observed in \hi\, \lya\, emission by the SOHO/UVCS instrument at four different…
Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke was observed from the Calar Alto Observatory (Spain) for four months during the 2021 inbound apparition. Broad-band visible images were taken between 1.71 and 1.25 AU pre-perihelion, while long-slit spectrophotometric…
The discovery of the first active interstellar object 2I/Borisov provides an unprecedented opportunity to study planetary formation processes in another planetary system. In particular, spectroscopic observations of 2I allow us to constrain…
From 1996 to 2015 sixteen main belt asteroids were discovered exhibiting cometary activity (less than one per year), all of them during searches at the telescope. In this work we will explore another way to discover them. We reduced 192016…
Taurids are an extensive stream of particles produced by comet 2P/Encke, which can be observed mainly in October and November as a series of meteor showers rich in bright fireballs. Several near-Earth asteroids have also been linked with…
Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was the target of a multi-wavelength worldwide investigation in 2005. The NASA Deep Impact mission reached the comet on 4.24 July 2005, delivering a 370 kg impactor which hit the comet at 10.3 km/s. Following this impact,…
Interstellar comets provide rare opportunities for probing the diversity of refractory and volatile inventory around other stars. As the second ever interstellar comet, and the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS has been the focus of…
2I/Borisov is the first-ever observed interstellar comet (and the second detected interstellar object). It was discovered on 30 August 2019 and has a heliocentric orbital eccentricity of ~ 3.35, corresponding to a hyperbolic orbit that is…
One of the goals of the Hubble Space Telescope program to observe periodic comet 9P/Tempel 1 in conjunction with NASA's Deep Impact mission was to study the generation and evolution of the gaseous coma resulting from the impact. For this…
133P/Elst-Pizarro is an object that has been described as either an active asteroid or a cometary object in the main asteroid belt. Here we present a photometric and polarimetric study of this object in an attempt to infer additional…
Observations of the sungrazing comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) were carried out using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at a heliocentric distance of 0.58-0.54 AU (pre-perihelion) on 2013 November 16-17. Temporally resolved…
We present the results of photometry, linear spectropolarimetry, and imaging circular polarimetry ofcomet C/2009 P1 (Garradd) performed at the 6-m telescope BTA of the Special Astrophysical Observatory(Russia) equipped by the multi-mode…
We report results from broadband visible images of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 on 2013 April 10. C/ISON's coma brightness follows a 1/{\rho} (where {\rho} is the projected distance…
We report on the catastrophic disintegration of P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS), an active asteroid, in April 2016. Deep images over three months show that object is constituted by a central concentration of fragments surrounded by an elongated coma,…
A photometric method is described for accurately quantifying the brightness of short-period comets far from perihelion. The method utilizes the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Catalog (Data Release 7) as a homogeneous source of reference star…
We quantified ten parent volatiles in comet C/2009 P1 (Garradd) before perihelion, through high-dispersion infrared spectra acquired with CRIRES at ESO's VLT on UT 2011 August 07 (Rh = 2.4 AU) and September 17-21 (Rh = 2.0 AU). On August…
High resolution spectropolarimetry of the Deep Impact target, comet 9P/ Tempel 1, was performed during the impact event on July 4th, 2005 with the HiVIS Spectropolarimeter and the AEOS 3.67m telescope on Haleakala, Maui. We observed…