Wherever You Go, There You Are — Evolution of Cometary Dust Trails Produced by Outbursts

<p>In the recent paper [1] we introduced the Dust Trail kit model capable of describing the evolution of a cometary dust trail. The model accounts for solar radiation pressure effects, gravitational disturbance caused by Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and gravitational interaction of the particles in the trail with the parent comet itself. Excellent accuracy of computations is due to their implementation in Orekit Open Source Library for Operational Flight Dynamics, which executes Dormad-Prince numerical integration methods with higher precision. We demonstrate performance of the model by studying the comet 17P/Holmes, which underwent through&#160;a massive outburst&#160;in October 2007 &#8212; the largest documented outburst by a comet thus far. We simulate several particle populations with sizes ranging from 0.001 to 1&#160;mm and by varying assumptions about ejection speed distribution of the particles at the start of the outburst. The model is validated against our earlier observations of the trail obtained in common nodes for 0.5 and 1 revolutions. Using these data, we made predictions for the two-revolution dust trail behavior near the outburst point and the observability from Earth of the cometary material released in the event [1]. We have further developed a set of Python scripts to calculate position of the dust trail for observatory topographical location coordinates [2]. Using these predictions, a set of new observations of the 2007 outburst dust trail was obtained in February, March, October, and December 2022. The trail is still observable by using even moderate ground-based telescopes. The existence of an observable dust trail requires sunlight scattered by a significant number of micron-sized particles produced in the phenomena. Both the surface brightness and the position of the dust trail are within the limits of the published predictions provided by the Dust Trail kit model [1, 2].</p> <p>&#160;</p> <p>References</p> <p>1. Gritsevich M., Nissinen M., Oksanen A., Suomela J., Silber E.A. (2022). Evolution of the dust trail of comet 17P/Holmes, <em>Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society</em>, 513(2), 2201&#8211;2214,&#160;https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac822</p> <p>2. Nissinen M., Gritsevich M. (2022). Instructions on where and how to observe the comet 17P/Holmes dust trail. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6977358</p>