WISE/NEOWISE observations of comets Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Bauer J.M.
  2. Grav T.
  3. Fernandez Y.R.
  4. Mainzer A.K.
  5. Kramer E.A.,Masiero J.R.
  6. Spahr T.
  7. Nugent C.R.
  8. Stevenson R.A.
  9. Meech K.J.,Cutri R.M.
  10. Lisse C.M.
  11. Walker R.
  12. Dailey J.W.
  13. Rosser J.
  14. Krings P.,Ruecker K.
  15. Wright E.L.
  16. (the NEOWISE Team)
  17. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

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 (<D_LPC_>/<D_JFC_>) 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.

Keywords
  1. solar-system
  2. comets
  3. infrared-sources
  4. surveys
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2017AJ....154...53B
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/154/53
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/154/53
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.51540053

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History

2017-10-27T09:10:35Z
Resource record created
2017-10-27T09:10:35Z
Created
2017-12-13T19:20:00Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr