TY - JOUR
T1 - Ensemble properties of comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
AU - Solontoi, Michael
AU - Ivezić, Željko
AU - Jurić, Mario
AU - Becker, Andrew C.
AU - Jones, Lynne
AU - West, Andrew A.
AU - Kent, Steve
AU - Lupton, Robert H.
AU - Claire, Mark
AU - Knapp, Gillian R.
AU - Quinn, Tom
AU - Gunn, James E.
AU - Schneider, Donald P.
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS Web Site is http://www.sdss.org/ .
Funding Information:
Z.I. acknowledges support by NSF Grant AST-0551161 to LSST for design and development activity, and by the Croatian National Science Foundation Grant O-1548-2009 .
Funding Information:
M.S. would like to acknowledge support from the Brinson Foundation grant in aid of Astrophysics Research to the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum.
Funding Information:
M.J. wishes to acknowledge the support for this work provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship Grant #HF-51255.01-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under Contract NAS 5-26555.
Funding Information:
D.P.S. was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant AST 06-07634
PY - 2012/3
Y1 - 2012/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.008
DO - 10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84856807141
SN - 0019-1035
VL - 218
SP - 571
EP - 584
JO - Icarus
JF - Icarus
IS - 1
ER -