Related papers: The Composition of Comets
The interstellar traveler, 2I/Borisov, is the first clearly active extrasolar comet, ever detected in our Solar system. We obtained high-resolution interferometric observations of 2I/Borisov with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter…
A thin, bright dust cloud, which is associated with the Rosetta mission target object (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko), was observed after the 2002 perihelion passage. The neckline structure or dust trail nature of this cloud is controversial.…
The Rosetta space probe accompanied comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for more than two years, obtaining an unprecedented amount of unique data of the comet nucleus and inner coma. This work focuses identifying the source regions of faint…
Isotopic ratios provide a powerful tool for understanding the origins of materials, including the volatile and refractory matter within solar system bodies. Recent high sensitivity observations of molecular isotopologues, in particular with…
In this article I summarize the current state of knowledge about the composition of Titan's atmosphere, and our current understanding of the suggested chemistry that leads to that observed composition. I begin with our present knowledge of…
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Jupiter-family comet that was the target of the Rosetta mission, the first mission to successfully orbit and land a probe on a comet. This mission was accompanied by a large ground-based observing campaign. We…
We discuss the connection between the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds and those characteristics of cometary matter that could be remnants of it. The chemical evolution observed to occur in molecular clouds is summarized and a model…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…
We report our new spectropolarimetric observations for 67P dust over 4,000--9,000 Angstrom using the ESO/Very Large Telescope in January--March 2016 (phase angle ranging $\sim$26--5 deg) to constrain the properties of the dust particles of…
Comets are classified from their orbital characteristics into two separate classes: nearly-isotropic, mainly long-period comets and ecliptic, short-period comets. Members from the former class are coming from the Oort cloud. Those of the…
We summarize the collective knowledge of physical and surface properties of comet nuclei, focusing on those that are obtained from remote observations. We now have measurements or constraints on effective radius for over 200 comets,…
Many things in current interstellar dust studies are taken as well understood givens by much of the community. For example, it is widely held that interstellar dust is made up of only three components, i.e., astronomical silicates, graphite…
Although the debate regarding the origin of the cyano (CN) radical in comets has been ongoing for many decades, it has yielded no definitive answer to date. CN could previously only be studied remotely, strongly hampering efforts to…
We discuss the morphology and spectrophotometry of 5 comets visible in August, 2001. We decompose comae into coma profiles and azimuthally renormalized images, in which general and local features are quantitatively comparable. Comet…
A comet ionospheric model assuming the plasma to move radially outward with the same bulk speed as the neutral gas and not being subject to severe reduction through dissociative recombination has previously been tested in a series of case…
We analyze findings of the Stardust mission that brought to the Earth dust from the 81P/Wild 2 coma. Just as the data of the Deep Impact mission to 9P/Tempel 1, they are at odds with the widely accepted condensation/sublimation comet…
Solar and extrasolar comets and extrasolar planets are the subject of numerous studies in order to determine their chemical composition and internal structure. In the case of planetesimals, their compositions are important as they govern in…
The first 1000 km of the ion tail of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko were explored by the European Rosetta spacecraft, 2.7 au away from the Sun. We characterised the dynamics of both the solar wind and the cometary ions on the night-side of…
We show that if comets (or any small icy planetesimals such as Kuiper belt objects) are composed of pebble piles, their internal radiogenic as well as geochemical heating results in considerably different evolutionary outcomes compared to…
During 2006 Mar - 2007 Jan, we used the IRAC and MIPS instruments on the Spitzer Space Telescope to study the infrared emission from the ensemble of fragments, meteoroids, and dust tails in the more than 3 degree wide…