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29 March 2024
 
  » arxiv » 1202.2126

 Article overview


Discovery of Main-Belt Comet P/2006 VW139 by Pan-STARRS1
Henry H. Hsieh ; Bin Yang ; Nader Haghighipour ; Heather M. Kaluna ; Alan Fitzsimmons ; Larry Denneau ; Bojan Novakovic ; Robert Jedicke ; Richard J. Wainscoat ; James D. Armstrong ; Samuel R. Duddy ; Stephen C. Lowry ; Chadwick A. Trujillo ; Marco Micheli ; Jacqueline V. Keane ; Laurie Urban ; Timm Riesen ; Karen J. Meech ; Shinsuke Abe ; Yu-Chi Cheng ; Wen-Ping Chen ; Mikael Granvik ; Tommy Grav ; Wing-Huen Ip ; Daisuke Kinoshita ; Jan Kleyna ; Pedro Lacerda ; Tim Lister ; Andrea Milani ; David J. Tholen ; Peter Veres ; Carey M. Lisse ; Michael S. Kelley ; Yanga R. Fernandez ; Bhuwan C. Bhatt ; Devendra K. Sahu ; Nick Kaiser ; K. C. Chambers ; Klaus W. Hodapp ; Eugene A. Magnier ; Paul A. Price ; John L. Tonry ;
Date 9 Feb 2012
AbstractMain belt asteroid (300163) 2006 VW139 (later designated P/2006 VW139) was discovered to exhibit comet-like activity by the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope using automated point-spread-function analyses performed by PS1’s Moving Object Processing System. Deep follow-up observations show both a short (sim 10") antisolar dust tail and a longer (sim 60") dust trail aligned with the object’s orbit plane, similar to the morphology observed for another main-belt comet, P/2010 R2 (La Sagra), and other well-established comets, implying the action of a long-lived, sublimation-driven emission event. Photometry showing the brightness of the near-nucleus coma remaining constant over sim 30 days provides further evidence for this object’s cometary nature, suggesting it is in fact a main-belt comet, and not a disrupted asteroid. A spectroscopic search for CN emission was unsuccessful, though we find an upper limit CN production rate of Q_CN < 1.3x10^24 mol/s, from which we infer a water production rate of Q_H2O < 10^26 mol/s. We also find an approximately linear optical spectral slope of 7.2%/1000A, similar to other cometary dust comae. Numerical simulations indicate that P/2006 VW139 is dynamically stable for > 100 Myr, while a search for a potential asteroid family around the object reveals a cluster of 24 asteroids within a cutoff distance of 68 m/s. At 70 m/s, this cluster merges with the Themis family, suggesting that it could be similar to the Beagle family to which another main-belt comet, 133P/Elst-Pizarro, belongs.
Source arXiv, 1202.2126
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