Related papers: The Dust Tail of Asteroid (3200) Phaethon
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…
Photometric observations of asteroid (596) Scheila were obtained during and after its 2010 outburst. The estimated radius of the body (spherical approximation of the asteroidal body) was 51.2 km and 50.67 km for different methods. The…
We have used the Keck I telescope to image at 11.7 microns and 17.9 microns the dust emission around zeta Lep, a main sequence A-type star at 21.5 pc from the Sun with an infrared excess. The excess is at most marginally resolved at 17.9…
Main-belt asteroid 2010 LH$_{15}$ has been classified as an active asteroid, based on the recent discovery of dust activity from the archival images observed in 2010 and 2019. In this study, we perform measurements and dynamical modeling of…
Context. During their journey to perihelion, comets may appear in the field-of-view of space-borne optical instruments, showing in some cases a nicely developed plasma tail extending from their coma and exhibiting an oscillatory behaviour.…
We report on optical polarimetric observations of two Apollo type near-Earth asteroids, (422699) 2000 PD3 and (3200) Phaethon, and BVRI photometric observations of 2000 PD3 using the 1.6m Pirka telescope in 2017. We derived the geometric…
Thermophysical models allow for improved constraints on the physical and thermal surface properties of asteroids beyond what can be inferred from more simple thermal modeling, provided a sufficient number of observations is available. We…
We report on the characterisation of the dust activity and dynamical evolution of two faint active asteroids, P/2019 A4, and P/2021 A5, observed with the 10.4m GTC using both imaging and spectroscopy. Asteroid P/2019 A4 activity is found to…
Mathematical modelling has shown that activity of the Geminid meteor shower should rise with time, and that was confirmed by analysis of visual observations 1985--2016. We do not expect any outburst activity of the Geminid shower in 2017,…
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$^{-1}$),…
Long-period comet C/2020 S3 (Erasmus) reached perihelion at 0.398 au on UT 2020 December 12.67, making it a bright, near-Sun object. Images taken between mid-November and December 2020 using the HI-1 camera and COR2 coronagraph onboard…
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,…
Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) has provided an unprecedented opportunity to observe a bright comet over a wide range of heliocentric distances. We present here Spitzer Space Telescope observations of Hale-Bopp from 2005 and 2008 that show a…
The near-Earth object (NEO) population, which mainly consists of fragments from collisions between asteroids in the main asteroid belt, is thought to include contributions from short-period comets as well. One of the most promising NEO…
The near-Earth asteroid (196256) 2003 EH1 has been suggested to have a dynamical association with the Quadrantid meteoroid stream. We present photometric observations taken to investigate the physical character of this body and to explore…
Jupiter family comets contribute a significant amount of debris to near-Earth space. However, telescopic observations of these objects seem to suggest they have short physical lifetimes. If this is true, the material generated will also be…
We present a physical characterization of main-belt comet 176P/LINEAR. Observations show the object exhibiting a fan-shaped tail in late 2005, but then becoming inactive in early 2006. Using data from 2007 when the object was observed to be…
We observed asteroid (596) Scheila and its ejecta cloud using the Swift UV-optical telescope. We obtained photometry of the nucleus and the ejecta, and for the first time measured the asteroid's reflection spectrum between 290 - 500 nm. Our…
A bright burst, followed by an X-ray tail lasting ~10 ks, was detected during an XMM-Newton observation of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 carried out on 2009 February 3. The burst, also observed by SWIFT/BAT, had a spectrum well fit by the sum…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…