Comet 66P/du Toit: not a near Earth main belt comet
B. Yang, E. Jehin, F. J. Pozuelos, Y. Moulane, Y. Shinnaka, C. Opitom,, H. H. Hsieh, D. Hutsem\'ekers, and J. Manfroid

TL;DR
This study used spectral and dynamical analysis to investigate comet 66P/du Toit, concluding it is unlikely to originate from the asteroid main belt despite previous suggestions.
Contribution
The paper provides detailed spectroscopic, dust, and dynamical data showing 66P's properties differ from main belt comets, challenging its proposed main belt origin.
Findings
66P has a nuclear spin temperature of ~34 K.
Dust production rate peaks at 55 kg/s near perihelion.
Dynamical simulations indicate a capture time of about 10,000 years.
Abstract
Main belt comets (MBCs) are a peculiar class of volatile-containing objects with comet-like morphology and asteroid-like orbits. However, MBCs are challenging targets to study remotely due to their small sizes and the relatively large distance they are from the Sun and the Earth. Recently, a number of weakly active short-period comets have been identified that might originate in the asteroid main belt. Among all of the known candidates, comet 66P/du Toit has been suggested to have one of the highest probabilities of coming from the main belt. We obtained medium and high-resolution spectra of 66P from 300-2500 nm with the X-shooter/VLT and the UVES/VLT instruments in July 2018. We also obtained a series of narrow-band images of 66P to monitor the gas and dust activity between May and July 2018 with TRAPPIST-South. In addition, we applied a dust model to characterize the dust coma of 66P…
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.
