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Context: Remote light scattering and thermal infrared observations provide clues about the physical properties of cometary and interplanetary dust particles. Identifying these properties will lead to a better understanding of the formation…
Warm jupiters are an unexpected population of extrasolar planets that are too near to their host to have formed in situ, but distant enough to retain a significant eccentricity in the face of tidal damping. These planets are curiously…
Cometary comae are generally depleted in nitrogen. The main carriers for volatile nitrogen in comets are NH3 and HCN. It is known that ammonia readily combines with many acids like e.g. HCN, HNCO, HCOOH, etc. encountered in the interstellar…
The Langmuir Probe instrument on Rosetta monitored the photoelectron emission cur- rent of the probes during the Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in essence acting as a photodiode monitoring the solar ultraviolet…
The Wide Angle Camera of the OSIRIS instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft is equipped with several narrowband filters that are centered on the emission lines and bands of various fragment species. These are used to determine the…
Cometary meteoroid trails exist in the vicinity of comets, forming fine structure of the interplanetary dust cloud. The trails consist predominantly of cometary particles with sizes of approximately 0.1 mm to 1 cm which are ejected at low…
Tiny meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere and inducing meteor showers have long been thought to originate partly from cometary dust. Together with other dust particles, they form a huge cloud around the Sun, the zodiacal cloud. From…
Meteor physics can provide new clues about the size, structure, and density of cometary disintegration products, establishing a bridge between different research fields. From meteor magnitude data we have estimated the mass distribution of…
The origin of the particular shape of a small body like comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) is a topic of active research. How and when it acquired its peculiar characteristics has distinct implications on the origin of the solar…
The ESA Rosetta mission has allowed an extensive in-situ study of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In measurements performed by the ram gauge of the on-board COmet Pressure Sensor (COPS), features have been observed that deviate from the…
Comets hold the key to the understanding of our solar system, its formation and its evolution, and to the fundamental plasma processes at work both in it and beyond it. A comet nucleus emits gas as it is heated by the sunlight. The gas…
Far ultraviolet observations of comets yield information about the energetic processes that dissociate the sublimated gases from their primitive surfaces. Understanding which emission processes are dominant, their effects on the observed…
Comet disintegration proceeds both through sublimation and discrete splitting events. The cross-sectional area of material ejected by a comet may, within days, become many times greater than that of the Earth, making encounters with such…
The Ion Composition Analyzer (ICA) on the Rosetta spacecraft observed both the solar wind and the cometary ionosphere around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for nearly two years. However, observations of low energy cometary ions were…
Comets provide unique information about the physical and chemical properties of the environment in which the Solar system was formed. Understanding how cometary dust and ice evolve under the effect of sunlight is essential for constraining…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
In 2004, the Rosetta spacecraft was sent to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for the first ever long-term investigation of a comet. After its arrival in 2014, the spacecraft spent more than two years in immediate proximity to the comet.…
Following our previous detection of ubiquitous H2O and O2 absorption against the far-UV continuum of stars located near the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, we present a serendipitously observed stellar occultation that occurred…
We present a chemical kinetics model of the solid-phase chemical evolution of a comet, beginning with a long period of cold-storage in the Oort Cloud, followed by five orbits that bring the comet close to the Sun. The chemical model is…
Surface-bound exospheres facilitate volatile migration across the surfaces of nearly airless bodies. However, such transport requires that the body can both form and retain an exosphere. To form a sublimation exosphere requires the surface…