Explosion of Comet 17P/Holmes as revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope
William T. Reach, Jeremie Vaubaillon, Carey M. Lisse, Mikel Holloway,, Jeonghee Rho

TL;DR
This study used Spitzer Space Telescope observations to analyze the 2007 explosion of comet 17P/Holmes, revealing details about the ejecta's composition, size distribution, and the explosion mechanism involving interior crystallization of amorphous ice.
Contribution
It provides a detailed mineralogical and dynamical analysis of the comet's explosion, proposing a model involving subsurface volatile release and constraining physical properties of the nucleus.
Findings
Ejecta contained crystalline silicate grains and larger particles from slower ejection.
The explosion's energy exceeded the comet's gravitational binding energy.
The event was likely caused by crystallization and volatile release from subsurface amorphous ice.
Abstract
An explosion on comet 17P/Holmes occurred on 2007 Oct 23, projecting particulate debris of a wide range of sizes into the interplanetary medium. We observed the comet using the Spitzer spectrograph on 2007 Nov 10 and 2008 Feb 27, and the photometer, on 2008 Mar 13. The fresh ejecta have detailed mineralogical features from small crystalline silicate grains. The 2008 Feb 27 spectra, and the central core of the 2007 Nov 10 spectral map, reveal nearly featureless spectra, due to much larger grains that were ejected from the nucleus more slowly. We break the infrared image into three components (size, speed) that also explain the temporal evolution of the mm-wave flux. Optical images were obtained on multiple dates spanning 2007 Oct 27 to 2008 Mar 10 at the Holloway Comet Observatory and 1.5-m telescope at Palomar Observatory. The orientation of the leading edge of the ejecta shell and the…
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