Related Research Articles
Catalina Sky Survey is an astronomical survey to discover comets and asteroids. It is conducted at the Steward Observatory's Catalina Station, located near Tucson, Arizona, in the United States.
The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System located at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, US, consists of astronomical cameras, telescopes and a computing facility that is surveying the sky for moving or variable objects on a continual basis, and also producing accurate astrometry and photometry of already-detected objects. In January 2019 the second Pan-STARRS data release was announced. At 1.6 petabytes, it is the largest volume of astronomical data ever released.
Active asteroids are small Solar System bodies that have asteroid-like orbits but show comet-like visual characteristics. That is, they show a coma, tail, or other visual evidence of mass-loss, but their orbits remain within Jupiter's orbit. These bodies were originally designated main-belt comets (MBCs) in 2006 by astronomers David Jewitt and Henry Hsieh, but this name implies they are necessarily icy in composition like a comet and that they only exist within the main-belt, whereas the growing population of active asteroids shows that this is not always the case.
354P/LINEAR, provisionally designated P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), is a small main-belt asteroid that was impacted by another asteroid sometime before 2010. It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) at Socorro, New Mexico on 6 January 2010. The asteroid possesses a dusty, comet-like trail of debris that remained for nearly a decade since impact. This was the first time a small-body collision had been observed; since then, minor planet 596 Scheila has also been seen to undergo a collision, in late 2010. The tail is created by millimeter-sized particles being pushed back by solar radiation pressure.
C/2011 L4 (PanSTARRS), also known as Comet PANSTARRS, is a non-periodic comet discovered in June 2011 that became visible to the naked eye when it was near perihelion in March 2013. It was discovered using the Pan-STARRS telescope located near the summit of Haleakalā, on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Comet C/2011 L4 probably took millions of years to come from the Oort cloud. After leaving the planetary region of the Solar System, the post-perihelion orbital period is estimated to be roughly 107000 years. Dust and gas production suggests the comet nucleus is roughly 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) in diameter, while based on the absolute nuclear magnitude and a geometric albedo of 0.04 the diameter of the nucleus is over 2.4 kilometers (1.5 mi). A method based on coma magnitude decay fuction estimated the effective radius at 2.317 ± 0.190 km.
311P/PanSTARRS also known as P/2013 P5 (PanSTARRS) is an active asteroid discovered by Bryce T. Bolin using the Pan-STARRS telescope on 27 August 2013. Observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that it had six comet-like tails. The tails are suspected to be streams of material ejected by the asteroid as a result of a rubble pile asteroid spinning fast enough to remove material from it. This is similar to 331P/Gibbs, which was found to be a quickly-spinning rubble pile as well.
Comet 252P/LINEAR is a periodic comet and near-Earth object discovered by the LINEAR survey on April 7, 2000. The comet is a Jupiter family comet, meaning that it passes quite close to the orbit of Jupiter.
460P/PanSTARRS (also known with the provisional designation P/2016 BA14) is a near-Earth object and periodic comet of the Jupiter family, with an orbital period of 5.25 years. In March 2016 it passed at distance of 2.2 million miles (3.5 million km, or 9 lunar distances) from Earth. It was the closest approach by a comet since 1770 and 3rd closest recorded comet to Earth. The close flyby enabled the size of the nucleus to be calculated at about 1 km (0.62 mi) in diameter, which was much bigger than expected. The comet is very dark, reflecting about 2-3 percent of the visible light, about the same as a charcoal briquette. It has a very similar orbit as numbered comet 252P/LINEAR, and may be related to it (e.g. split off of).
(300163) 2006 VW139, provisional designations 2006 VW139 and P/2006 VW139, as well as periodic cometary number 288P, is a kilometer-sized asteroid from the outer regions of the asteroid belt and the first "binary main-belt comet" ever discovered.
C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) is an Oort cloud comet with an inbound hyperbolic orbit, discovered in May 2017 at a distance beyond the orbit of Saturn when it was 16 AU (2.4 billion km) from the Sun. Precovery images from 2013 were located by July. It had been in the constellation of Draco from July 2007 until August 2020. As of June 2022, the 3-sigma uncertainty in the current distance of the comet from the Sun is ±6000 km.
ʻOumuamua is the first interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. Formally designated 1I/2017 U1, it was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km from Earth and already heading away from the Sun.
C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS) is a comet, discovered using the Pan-STARRS telescopes on September 7, 2016. The comet attracted attention from many astronomers as it approached its closest point to the sun in May 2018. It has been observed to have a very complex tail, which has been suggested to be due to a fast rotation period of the nucleus.
C/2017 U7 (PanSTARRS) is a hyperbolic comet, first observed on 29 October 2017 by astronomers of the Pan-STARRS facility at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, United States when the object was 7.8 AU (1.2 billion km) from the Sun. Despite being discovered only 10 days after interstellar asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua, it was not announced until March 2018 as its orbit is not strongly hyperbolic beyond most Oort Cloud comets. Based on the absolute magnitude of 10.6, it may measure tens of kilometers in diameter. As of August 2018, there is only 1 hyperbolic asteroid known, ʻOumuamua, but hundreds of hyperbolic comets are known.
C/2018 F4 (PanSTARRS) is a hyperbolic comet. It was discovered on 17 March 2018 when it was beyond the orbit of Jupiter, 6.4 AU (960 million km) from the Sun. It was quite far from the Sun and turned out to simply be an asteroidal object that was discovered before cometary activity was noticeable. As perihelion is inside the orbit of Jupiter, this object should become more active. In April 2018 it was determined to be a hyperbolic comet. Given that the incoming velocity was similar to that of an Oort cloud object, we can very confidently say that it is not of interstellar origin. C/2018 F4 fragmented around August 2020.
2I/Borisov, originally designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), is the first observed rogue comet and the second observed interstellar interloper after ʻOumuamua. It was discovered by the Crimean amateur astronomer and telescope maker Gennadiy Borisov on 29 August 2019 UTC.
P/2019 LD2 (ATLAS) is a Jupiter-family comet discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System on 10 June 2019. It was initially reported as the first known Jupiter trojan asteroid to display cometary activity, but its classification as a Jupiter trojan was retracted after closer examination and a longer observation arc revealed its orbit to be unstable like a typical Jupiter family comet and implied that its position near the trojans is temporary.
C/2017 T2 (PanSTARRS) is an Oort cloud comet discovered on 2 October 2017 when it was 9.2 AU (1.38 billion km) from the Sun. The closest approach to Earth was on 28 December 2019 at a distance of 1.52 AU (227 million km). It came to perihelion on 4 May 2020 when it was safe from disintegration at 1.6 AU from the Sun.
C/2021 O3 (PanSTARRS) is perhaps an Oort cloud comet, discovered on 26 July 2021 by the Pan-STARRS sky survey. It came to perihelion on 21 April 2022 at 0.287 AU (42.9 million km). from the Sun.
P/2013 R3 (Catalina–PanSTARRS) was an active main-belt asteroid that disintegrated from 2013 to 2014 due to the centrifugal breakup of its rapidly-rotating nucleus. It was discovered by astronomers of the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys on 15 September 2013. The disintegration of this asteroid ejected numerous fragments and dusty debris into space, which temporarily gave it a diffuse, comet-like appearance with a dust tail blown back by solar radiation pressure. Observations by ground-based telescopes in October 2013 revealed that P/2013 R3 had broken up into four major components, with later Hubble Space Telescope observations showing that these components have further broken up into at least thirteen smaller fragments ranging 100–400 meters (330–1,310 ft) in diameter. P/2013 R3 was never seen again after February 2014.
P/2016 J1 (PanSTARRS) is a pair of active main-belt asteroids that split apart from each other in early 2010. The brightest and largest component of the pair, P/2016 J1-A, was discovered first by the Pan-STARRS 1 survey at Haleakalā Observatory on 5 May 2016. Follow-up observations by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory discovered the second component, P/2016 J1-B, on 6 May 2016. Both asteroids are smaller than 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) in diameter, with P/2016 J1-A being roughly 0.6 km (0.37 mi) in diameter and P/2016 J1-B being roughly 0.3 km (0.19 mi) in diameter. The two components recurrently exhibit cometary activity as they approach the Sun near perihelion, suggesting that their activity is driven by sublimation of volatile compounds such as water.
References
- ↑ Olivier R. Hainaut; Jan T. Kleyna; Karen J. Meech; Mark Boslough; Marco Micheli; Richard Wainscoat; Marielle Dela Cruz; Jacqueline V. Keane; Devendra K. Sahu; Bhuwan C. Bhatt (2 July 2019). "Disintegration of Active Asteroid P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS)". Astronomy & Astrophysics . arXiv: 1907.00751 .
The position of P/2016 G1 was imaged 12 additional times in the PS1 data prior to discovery, between 2011 Feb. 23 and 2015 Jan. 17 and nothing was visible down to the limiting magnitudes shown in Table .1.
- ↑ F. Moreno; J. Licandro; A. Cabrera-Lavers; F.J. Pozuelos (2016). "Early evolution of disrupted asteroid P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS)". The Astrophysical Journal Letters . 826 (2): L22. arXiv: 1607.03375 . Bibcode:2016ApJ...826L..22M. doi: 10.3847/2041-8205/826/2/L22 . S2CID 118413776.
P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS) (hereafter P/2016 G1 for short) was discovered by R. Weryk and R. J. Wainscoat on CCD images acquired on 2016 April 1 UT with the 1.8-m PanSTARRS1 telescope (Weryk & Wainscoat 2016).
- ↑ de la Fuente Marcos, Carlos; de la Fuente Marcos, Raúl (2022). "Recent arrivals to the main asteroid belt". Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. 134 (5): 38. doi: 10.1007/s10569-022-10094-4 . ISSN 0923-2958. S2CID 251638931.
- ↑ "JPL Small-Body Database Browser: P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS)" (2016-08-09 last obs.). Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Archived from the original on 6 June 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2020.
- ↑ Robin George Andrews (26 November 2019). "This Is What It Looks Like When an Asteroid Gets Destroyed". The New York Times . Archived from the original on 6 June 2022. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
Astronomers first discovered P/2016 G1 with the Pan-Starrs1 telescope in Hawaii in April 2016. Backtracking through archived images, astronomers realized that it had first been visible the previous month as a centralized collection of rocky clumps: the fractured, rubbly remnants of the asteroid, surrounded by a fine dust cloud, most likely the immediate debris jettisoned by the impact.
- 1 2 3 Nola Taylor Redd (20 November 2019). "Deadly Collision Blows an Asteroid Apart". Eos Science News by AGU . Archived from the original on 1 December 2019. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
By 2017, P/2016 G1 was completely gone, most likely blown apart by the collision.
