WISE/NEOWISE observations of comets

DOI

We use NEOWISE data from the four-band and three-band cryogenic phases of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission to constrain size distributions of the comet populations and debias measurements of the short- and long-period comet (LPC) populations. We find that the fit to the debiased LPC population yields a cumulative size-frequency distribution (SFD) power-law slope ({beta}) of -1.0+/-0.1, while the debiased Jupiter-family comet (JFC) SFD has a steeper slope with {beta}=-2.3+/-0.2. The JFCs in our debiased sample yielded a mean nucleus size of 1.3km in diameter, while the LPCs' mean size is roughly twice as large, 2.1km, yielding mean size ratios (/) that differ by a factor of 1.6. Over the course of the 8 months of the survey, our results indicate that the number of LPCs passing within 1.5 au are a factor of several higher than previous estimates, while JFCs are within the previous range of estimates of a few thousand down to sizes near 1.3km in diameter. Finally, we also observe evidence for structure in the orbital distribution of LPCs, with an overdensity of comets clustered near 110{deg} inclination and perihelion near 2.9 au that is not attributable to observational bias.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.51540053
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/154/53
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/154/53
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/AJ/154/53
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/154/53
Provenance
Creator Bauer J.M.; Grav T.; Fernandez Y.R.; Mainzer A.K.; Kramer E.A.,Masiero J.R.; Spahr T.; Nugent C.R.; Stevenson R.A.; Meech K.J.,Cutri R.M.; Lisse C.M.; Walker R.; Dailey J.W.; Rosser J.; Krings P.,Ruecker K.; Wright E.L.; (the NEOWISE Team)
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2017
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Cosmology; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Solar System Astronomy