DIRBE Comet Trails
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Date
2014-11-13
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Citation of Original Publication
Arendt, R. G., “DIRBE Comet Trails”, The Astronomical Journal, vol. 148, no. 6, 2014. doi:10.1088/0004-6256/148/6/135.
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Abstract
Re-examination of the Cosmic Background Explorer Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (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 μm surface brightnesses of $\lt 0.1$ and $\lt 0.15$ MJy sr−1, respectively, which is $\lt 1\%$ 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 1 additional comet and 13 additional asteroids that had not previously been recognized in the DIRBE data.