Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Solontoi, Michael
• Ivezić, Željko
• Jurić, Mario
• Becker, Andrew C.
• Jones, Lynne
• West, Andrew A.
• Kent, Steve
• Lupton, Robert H.
• Claire, Mark
• Knapp, Gillian R.
• Quinn, Tom
• Gunn, James E.
• Schneider, Donald P.

Titel

Ensemble properties of comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Ist Teil von

• Icarus (New York, N.Y. 1962), 2012-03, Vol.218 (1), p.571-584

Ort / Verlag

Amsterdam: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

Access via ScienceDirect (Elsevier)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• ► 31 comets (27 resolved and 4 unresolved) have been observed by the SDSS. ► Colors, sizes, surface brightness profiles, and dust production rates are measured. ► Cumulative luminosity function well fit by a power law, with evidence of a break. ► Comets have an extremely narrow distribution of colors (e.g. 0.57±0.05 in g−r). ► No correlation between color and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters. We present the ensemble properties of 31 comets (27 resolved and 4 unresolved) observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This sample of comets represents about 1 comet per 10million SDSS photometric objects. Five-band (u,g,r,i,z) photometry is used to determine the comets’ colors, sizes, surface brightness profiles, and rates of dust production in terms of the Afρ formalism. We find that the cumulative luminosity function for the Jupiter Family Comets in our sample is well fit by a power law of the form N(<H)∝10(0.49±0.05)H for H<18, with evidence of a much shallower fit N(<H)∝10(0.19±0.03)H for the faint (14.5<H<18) comets. The resolved comets show an extremely narrow distribution of colors (0.57±0.05 in g−r for example), which are statistically indistinguishable from that of the Jupiter Trojans. Further, there is no evidence of correlation between color and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters for the observed comets.