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Related papers: Molecular Oxygen in Oort Cloud Comet 1P/Halley

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Complex organic molecules (COMs) are thought to form on icy dust grains in the earliest phase of star formation. The evolution of these COMs from the youngest Class 0/I protostellar phases toward the more evolved Class II phase is still not…

The Jupiter-family comet 10P/Tempel 2 was observed during its 2010 return with the Herschel Space Observatory. We present here the observation of the (J, K) = (1, 0)-(0, 0) transition of ammonia at 572 GHz in this comet with the Heterodyne…

The Cometary Secondary Ion Mass Analyzer (COSIMA) onboard ESA's Rosetta orbiter has revealed that dust particles in the coma of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko are aggregates of small grains. We study the morphological, elastic, and…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2020-01-07 Hiroshi Kimura , Martin Hilchenbach , Sihane Merouane , John Paquette , Oliver Stenzel

We use measurements from the Rosetta plasma consortium (RPC) Langmuir probe (LAP) and mutual impedance probe (MIP) to study the spatial distribution of low-energy plasma in the near-nucleus coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The…

Through photometry and spectroscopy, we studied the evolution of the activity and chemical composition of comet 67P during its 2025 and 2021 perihelion passages and of comet 103P during its 2010 and 2023 passages. For each comet, we aim to…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-07 E. Hemmen , M. Vander Donckt , E. Jehin , S. Hmiddouch , K. Aravind , J. Manfroid , Z. Benkhaldoun , A. Jabiri , S. Ganesh

We report on photometry and imaging of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 obtained at Lowell Observatory from 1991 through 2011. We acquired photoelectric photometry on two nights in 1991, four nights in 1997/98, and 13 nights in 2010/11. We observed a…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-05 Matthew M. Knight , David G. Schleicher

Starting from several monthly data sets of Rosetta's COmetary Pressure Sensor we reconstruct the gas density in the coma around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The underlying inverse gas model is constructed by fitting ten thousands of…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2017-05-29 Tobias Kramer , Matthias Laeuter , Martin Rubin , Kathrin Altwegg

Hyperactive comets have high water production rates, with inferred sublimation areas of order the surface area of the nucleus. Comets 46P/Wirtanen and 103P/Hartley 2 are two examples of this cometary class. Based on observations of comet…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2021-07-06 Silvia Protopapa , Michael S. P. Kelley , Charles E. Woodward , Bin Yang

Hundreds of high-velocity atomic gas clouds exist above and below the Galactic Centre, with some containing a molecular component. However, the origin of these clouds in the Milky Way's wind is unclear. This paper presents new…

Comets have similar compositions to interstellar medium ices, suggesting at least some of their molecules maybe inherited from an earlier stage of evolution. To investigate the degree to which this might have occurred we compare the…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-09-26 Karen Willacy , Liton Majumdar , Boncho Bonev , Erika Gibb , Neil Dello Russo , Michael DiSanti , Ronald J. Vervack , Nathan X Roth

Cometary ices are formed during star and planet formation, and their molecular and elemental makeup can be related to the early solar system via the study of inter- and protostellar material. The first cometary abundance of the halogen…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-07-11 N. F. W Ligterink , M. Kama

We present wide-field near-IR images of Orion A. K and H2 1-0S(1) images of a contiguous 8 sqr degree region are compared to photometry from Spitzer and dust-continuum maps obtained with MAMBO and SCUBA. We also measure proper motions for…

Molecular oxygen (O2) paired with a reducing gas is regarded as a promising biosignature pair for the atmospheric characterization of terrestrial exoplanets. In circumstances when O2 may not be detectable in a planetary atmosphere (e.g., at…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-08-22 Thea Kozakis , João M. Mendonça , Lars A. Buchhave

The composition of comets in the Solar System come in multiple groups thought to encode information about their formation in different regions of the outer protosolar disk. The recent discovery of the second interstellar object, 2I/Borisov,…

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-04 L. Paganini , M. J. Mumma , G. L. Villanueva , M. A. DiSanti , B. P. Bonev , M. Lippi , H. Boehnhardt

Comet C/2013 US10 (Catalina) was an dynamically new Oort cloud comet whose apparition presented a favorable geometry for observations near close Earth approach (~0.93au) at heliocentric distances ~2au when insolation and sublimation of…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2020-11-16 Charles E. Woodward , Diane H. Wooden , David E. Harker , Michael S. P. Kelley , Ray W. Russell , Daryl L. Kim

Since its first identification on the surface of Ganymede in 1995, molecular oxygen (O2) ice has been at the center of a scientific debate as the surface temperature of the Jovian moon is on average well above the freezing point of O2.…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-06-01 A. Migliorini , Z. Kanuchova , S. Ioppolo , M. Barbieri , N. C. Jones , S. V. Hoffmann , G. Strazzulla , F. Tosi , G. Piccioni

To understand how Phosphorus-bearing molecules are formed in star-forming regions, we have analysed ALMA observations of PN and PO towards the massive star-forming region AFGL 5142, combined with a new analysis of the data of the comet…

Methods. We algorithmically tracked thousands of individual particles through four OSIRIS/NAC image sequences of 67P's near-nucleus coma. We then traced concentrated particle groups back to the nucleus surface, and estimated their potential…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-05-22 Marius Pfeifer , Jessica Agarwal , Raphael Marschall , Björn Grieger , Pablo Lemos

The N$_2$ and CO-rich and water-depleted comet C/2016 R2 (Pan-STARRS) (hereafter `C/2016 R2') is a unique comet for detailed spectroscopic analysis. We aim to explore the associated photochemistry of parent species, which produces different…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2020-03-25 S. Raghuram , D. Hutsemékers , C. Opitom , E. Jehin , A. Bhardwaj , J. Manfroid