"Atlas of Secular Light Curves of Comets"
Ignacio Ferrin

TL;DR
This paper compiles a large dataset of comet light curves to analyze their properties, classify comets by age and size, and introduce new parameters, revealing complexities and gaps in current understanding.
Contribution
It presents a comprehensive atlas of comet secular light curves with new parameters like P-AGE and T-AGE, and classifies comets based on these metrics.
Findings
Introduction of P-AGE and T-AGE as robust classification parameters
Identification of new comet classes based on photometric properties
Revealing complexities in comet light curves beyond current models
Abstract
In this work we have compiled 37,692 observations of 27 periodic and non-periodic comets to create the secular light curves (SLCs), using 2 plots per comet. The data has been reduced homogeneously. Our overriding goal is to learn the properties of the ensemble of comets. More than 30 parameters are listed, of which over ~20 are new and measured from the plots. We define two ages for a comet using activity as a proxy, the photometric age P-AGE, and the time-age, T-AGE. It is shown that these two parameters are robust, implying that the input data can have significant errors but P-AGE and T-AGE come out with small errors. This is due to their mathematical definition. It is shown that P-AGE classifies comets by shape of their light curve. The value of this Atlas is twofold: The SLCs not only show what we know, but also show what we do not know, thus pointing the way to meaningful…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstro and Planetary Science · Space Exploration and Technology · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
