Related papers: Optical spectroscopy of comets
The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of dust disks are widely used to infer dust properties (compositions and sizes) and disk structures (dust spatial distributions) which might be indicative of the presence or absence of planets or…
Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust, supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's atmosphere. The Rosetta mission at…
Observations of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko were performed with MUSE at large heliocentric distances post-perihelion, between March 3 and 7, 2016. Those observations were part of a simultaneous ground-based campaign aimed at providing…
Results from IRAS and recent X-ray and optical surveys are reviewed to discuss the properties and nature of the interstellar medium in elliptical galaxies. As to the dust component, there is a strong contrast with the situation among spiral…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Dust grains play a central role in the physics and chemistry of cosmic environments. They influence the optical and thermal properties of the medium due to their interaction with stellar radiation; provide surfaces for the chemical…
A major limitation and a continuing source of confusion in the interpretation of molecular line observations has been the large degree of chemical complexity that is observed in star-forming molecular cores. The past decade has seen…
The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…
The late stages of stellar evolution from asymptotic giant branch stars to planetary nebulae are now known to be an active phase of molecular synthesis. Over 80 gas-phase molecules have been detected through rotational transitions in the…
The ultraviolet and optical background forms a baseline for any observation of the sky. It includes emission lines and scattered light from the atmosphere; resonant scattering from the Lyman lines of interplanetary hydrogen and the…
The properties of unresolved protostars and their local environment (e.g., disk, envelope and outflow characteristics) are frequently inferred from spectral energy distributions (SEDs) through comparison with idealized model SEDs. However,…
We analyze the dust environment of the distant comet C/2014 A4 (SONEAR), with a perihelion distance near 4.1~au, using comprehensive observations obtained by different methods. We present an analysis of spectroscopy, photometry, and…
Cometary dust particles are remnants of the primordial accretion of refractory material that occurred during the initial stages of the Solar System formation. Understanding their physical structure can help constrain their accretion…
Imaging polarimetry enables the spatially resolved investigation of cometary dust properties across different morphological structures. While cometary comae have been studied thoroughly in the pertinent literature, cometary tails have…
Dust determines the temperature structure of protoplanetary disks. However, dust temperature determinations almost invariably rely on a complex modeling of the Spectral Energy Distribution. We attempt a direct determination of the…
Complex organic molecules are ubiquitous companions of young low-mass protostars. Recent observations suggest that their emission stems, not only from the traditional hot corino, but also from offset positions. In this work, 2D…
(Abridged) Aims & Methods. A two-dimensional, semi-analytical model is presented that follows, for the first time, the chemical evolution from a collapsing molecular cloud (a pre-stellar core) to a protostar and circumstellar disk. The…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
Distance estimates derived from spectroscopy or parallax have been unified by considering extinction by large grains. The addition of such a population of what is called Dark Dust to models of the diffuse interstellar medium is tested…
We observed 34 comets using the 24 micron camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Each image contains the nucleus and covers at least 10^6 km of each comet's orbit. Debris trails due to mm-sized or larger particles were found along the…