Related papers: Chemical and physical properties of cometary dust
The composition of cometary ices provides key information on the thermal and chemical properties of the outer parts of the protoplanetary disk where they formed 4.6 Gy ago. This chapter reviews our knowledge of composition of cometary comae…
Comets are thought to preserve almost pristine dust particles, thus providing a unique sample of the properties of the early solar nebula. The microscopic properties of this dust played a key part in particle aggregation during the…
As comets journey into the inner solar system, they deliver particulates and volatile gases into their comae that reveal the most primitive materials in the solar system. Cometary dust particles provide crucial information for assessing the…
Chondritic meteorites constitute the most ancient rock record available in the laboratory to study the formation of the solar system and its planets. Detailed investigations of their mineralogy, petrography, chemistry and isotopic…
When viewed from Earth, most of what we observe of a comet is dust. The influence of solar radiation pressure on the trajectories of dust particles depends on their cross-section to mass ratio. Hence solar radiation pressure acts like a…
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…
In situ research on cometary chemistry began when measurements from the Giotto mission at comet 1P/Halley revealed the presence of complex organics in the coma. New telescopes and space missions have provided detailed remote and in situ…
The MIDAS (Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System) atomic force microscope on board the Rosetta comet orbiter investigated and measured the 3D topography of a few hundred nm to tens of $\mu$m sized dust particles of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko…
The properties of the smallest subunits of cometary dust contain information on their origin and clues to the formation of planetesimals and planets. Compared to IDPs or particles collected during the Stardust mission, dust collected in the…
We present a possible correlation between the properties of scattered and thermal radiation from dust and the principal dust characteristics responsible for this relationship. To this end, we use the NASA/PDS archival polarimetric data on…
The origin of organic compounds detected in meteorites and comets, some of which could serve as precursors of life on Earth, still remains an open question. The aim of the present study is to make one more step in revealing the nature and…
Thanks to Rosetta orbiter's and Philae lander's data our knowledge of cometary nuclei composition has experienced a great advancement. The properties of 67P/CG nucleus are discussed and compared with other comets explored in the past by…
The chapter overviews the recent developments in the remote sensing of cometary dust using visible, near-infrared, and thermal-infrared radiation, as well as interaction of the dust with electromagnetic radiation, which affects the dynamics…
The zodiacal cloud is a thick circumsolar disk of small debris particles produced by asteroid collisions and comets. Here, we present a zodiacal cloud model based on the orbital properties and lifetimes of comets and asteroids, and on the…
Organic compounds are ubiquitous in space: they are found in diffuse clouds, in the envelopes of evolved stars, in dense star-forming regions, in protoplanetary disks, in comets, on the surfaces of minor planets, and in meteorites and…
Molecular oxygen has been confirmed as the fourth most abundant molecule in cometary material O$_2$/H$_2$O $\sim 4$ %) and is thought to have a primordial nature, i.e., coming from the interstellar cloud from which our solar system was…
The CoPhyLab (Cometary Physics Laboratory) project is designed to study the physics of comets through a series of earth-based experiments. For these experiments, a dust analogue was created with physical properties comparable to those of…
The physical properties of cometary nuclei observed today relate to their complex history and help to constrain their formation and evolution. In this article, we review some of the main physical properties of cometary nuclei and focus in…
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
Cometary dust provides a unique window on dust growth mechanisms during the onset of planet formation. Measurements by the Rosetta spacecraft show that the dust in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a granular structure at size…