The Formation of Striae within Cometary Dust Tails by a Sublimation-Driven YORP-like Effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces a sublimation-driven analogue to the YORP effect (SYORP) that explains the formation of striae in cometary tails by applying a new torque mechanism to icy bodies, matching observations of specific comets.

Contribution

The paper proposes the SYORP effect as a new mechanism for comet tail striae formation, extending YORP theory to sublimation-driven torques affecting small icy bodies.

Findings

SYORP explains striae formation between 0.6 and 1 AU from the Sun.

SYORP can produce striae matching those observed in Comet West.

The size distribution of parent chunks follows a power-law with index -1.4.

Abstract

Sublimating gas molecules scatter off of the surface of an icy body in the same manner as photons. This means that for every photon-driven body force, there should be a sublimation-driven analogue that affects icy bodies. Thermal photons emitted from the surfaces of asymmetrically shaped bodies in the Solar System generate net torques that change the spin rates of these bodies over time. The long-term averaging of this torque is called the YORP effect. Here we propose a sublimation-driven analogue to the YORP effect (SYORP), in which sublimating gas molecules emitted from the surfaces of icy bodies also generate net torques on the bodies. However, sublimating molecules carry momentum away from the body at a rate ~10^4-10^5 greater than thermal photons, resulting in much greater body torques. While previous studies of sublimative torques focused on emissions from highly localized sources on the surfaces of Jupiter Family Comet nuclei, SYORP applies to non-localized emissions across the entire body, which likely dominates sublimation-drive torques on small icy chunks and Dynamically Young Comets, and can therefore be applied without high-resolution spacecraft observations of their surfaces. Instead, we repurpose the equations of the YORP effect to account for sublimation-driven torques. We show how an SYORP-driven mechanism best matches observations of the Sun-oriented lineaments (striae) of comet tails, whose formation mechanism has remained enigmatic for decades. The SYORP effect explains why striae are observed between near-perihelion and ~1 AU from the Sun for comets with perihelia less than 0.6 AU, and solves longstanding problems with moving enough material into the cometary tail to form visible striae. We show that SYORP can form striae that match those of Comet West, and produce a power-law size frequency distribution of their parent chunks with an index of -1.4 (-1.1- 2).