DIRBE Comet Trails

TL;DR

This study re-analyzed COBE DIRBE data, revealing thermal emissions from multiple comet dust trails, including new detections of several comets and asteroids, enhancing understanding of dust trail visibility and associations with meteor showers.

Contribution

It is the first to report thermal emissions of several previously unreported comet dust trails and identify additional objects in DIRBE data.

Findings

Detected dust trails of 1P/Halley, 169P/NEAT, and 3200 Phaethon for the first time.

Identified one additional comet and 13 asteroids in DIRBE data.

Trails are faint, requiring movies to detect, and are linked to meteor showers.

Abstract

Re-examination of the COBE DIRBE data reveals the thermal emission of several comet dust trails. The dust trails of 1P/Halley, 169P/NEAT, and 3200 Phaethon have not been previously reported. The known trails of 2P/Encke, and 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 are also seen. The dust trails have 12 and 25 micron surface brightnesses of <0.1 and <0.15 MJy/sr, respectively, which is <1% of the zodiacal light intensity. The trails are very difficult to see in any single daily image of the sky, but are evident as rapidly moving linear features in movies of the DIRBE data. Some trails are clearest when crossing through the orbital plane of the parent comet, but others are best seen at high ecliptic latitudes as the Earth passes over or under the dust trail. All these comets have known associations with meteor showers. This re-examination also reveals one additional comet and 13 additional asteroids that had not previously been recognized in the DIRBE data.