When Comets Get Old: A Synthesis of Comet and Meteor Observations of the Low Activity Comet 209P/LINEAR
Quan-Zhi Ye, Man-To Hui, Peter G. Brown, Margaret D. Campbell-Brown,, Petr Pokorn\'y, Paul A. Wiegert, Xing Gao

TL;DR
This paper synthesizes comet and meteor observations of 209P/LINEAR, revealing its low activity, dust properties, and evolutionary status as an aging, nearly dormant comet with a stable orbit for thousands of years.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis combining observational data and modeling to characterize the low activity and evolutionary stage of comet 209P/LINEAR, highlighting its transition towards dormancy.
Findings
209P/LINEAR has low dust ejection speed and large dust grains.
The nucleus is similar to D-type asteroids and Trojans.
The comet has been in a stable near-Earth orbit for about 10,000 years.
Abstract
It is speculated that some weakly active comets may be transitional objects between active and dormant comets. These objects are at a unique stage of the evolution of cometary nuclei, as they are still identifiable as active comets, in contrast to inactive comets that are observationally indistinguishable from low albedo asteroids. In this paper, we present a synthesis of comet and meteor observations of Jupiter-family comet 209P/LINEAR, one of the most weakly active comets recorded to-date. Images taken by the Xingming 0.35-m telescope and the Gemini Flamingo-2 camera are modeled by a Monte Carlo dust model, which yields a low dust ejection speed ( of that of moderately active comets), dominance of large dust grains, and a low dust production of at 19~d after the 2014 perihelion passage. We also find a reddish nucleus of 209P/LINEAR that is similar…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
