The Highly Unusual Outgassing of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 from Narrowband Photometry and Imaging of the Coma

TL;DR

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of Comet 103P/Hartley 2's outgassing behavior over two decades, revealing a secular decrease in activity, asymmetry around perihelion, and detailed coma morphology linked to source regions and grain dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first long-term, multi-epoch photometric and imaging dataset of Hartley 2, highlighting changes in activity, morphology, and source regions of gas and dust emissions.

Findings

Secular decrease in water and species production over 20 years

Asymmetry with peak activity ~10 days post-perihelion

Coma morphology consistent across species, with hourglass shapes and tailward features

Abstract

We report on photometry and imaging of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 obtained at Lowell Observatory from 1991 through 2011. We acquired photoelectric photometry on two nights in 1991, four nights in 1997/98, and 13 nights in 2010/11. We observed a strong secular decrease in water and all other observed species production in 2010/11 from the 1991 and 1997/98 levels. We see evidence for a strong asymmetry with respect to perihelion in the production rates of our usual bandpasses, with peak production occurring ~10 days post-perihelion and production rates considerably higher post-perihelion. The composition was "typical", in agreement with the findings of other investigators. We obtained imaging on 39 nights from 2010 July until 2011 January. We find that, after accounting for their varying parentage and lifetimes, the C2 and C3 coma morphology resemble the CN morphology we reported previously. These species exhibited an hourglass shape in October and November, and the morphology changed with rotation and evolved over time. The OH and NH coma morphology showed hints of an hourglass shape near the nucleus, but was also enhanced in the anti-sunward hemisphere. This tailward brightness enhancement did not vary significantly with rotation and evolved with the viewing geometry. We conclude that all five gas species likely originate from the same source regions on the nucleus, but that OH and NH were derived from small grains of water and ammonia ice that survived long enough to be affected by radiation pressure and driven in the anti-sunward direction. We detected the faint, sunward facing dust jet reported by other authors, and did not detect a corresponding gas feature. This jet varied little during a night but exhibited some variations from night to night, suggesting it is located near the total angular momentum vector.