Abstract

Invited Talk - Plenary

Friday, 13 September 2024, 09:00   (Aula 1&2 / virtual plenum)

Active asteroids and the binary main-belt comet 288P

Jessica Agarwal
TU Braunschweig

Our solar system hosts various populations of small bodies that are probably composed of material residual from the process of planet formation. While comets are occasional visitors to the inner solar system originating from reservoirs of ice-rich bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, most asteroids have spent the past few billion years between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Given their proximity to the Sun, water ice in asteroids can only have survived in their interiors, below a thermally insulating layer of refractory material. Consequently, typical asteroids display rocky surfaces and appear as point sources in telescopes. Over the past three decades, "active asteroids" have been discovered that have the orbits of typical asteroids but display comet-like dust tails. The "main-belt comets" are a subgroup of the active asteroids whose dust emission is driven by the sublimation of water ice. This activity must have been triggered by an event that exposed this ice to solar irradiation, such as an impact or a landslide. This talk will explore the various processes suspected to eject dust from asteroids and showcase their potential interconnections using the example of binary main-belt comet 288P.