Michael Solontoi, Zeljko Ivezic, Mario Juric, Andrew C. Becker, Lynne Jones, Andrew A. West, Steve Kent, Robert H. Lupton, Mark Claire, Gillian R. Knapp, Tom Quinn, James E. Gunn, Donald P. Schneider
We present the ensemble properties of 31 comets (27 resolved and 4
unresolved) observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This sample of
comets represents about 1 comet per 10 million SDSS photometric objects.
Five-band (u,g,r,i,z) photometry is used to determine the comets' colors,
sizes, surface brightness profiles, and rates of dust production in terms of
the Af{\rho} formalism. We find that the cumulative luminosity function for the
Jupiter Family Comets in our sample is well fit by a power law of the form N(<
H) \propto 10(0.49\pm0.05)H for H < 18, with evidence of a much shallower fit
N(< H) \propto 10(0.19\pm0.03)H for the faint (14.5 < H < 18) comets. The
resolved comets show an extremely narrow distribution of colors (0.57 \pm 0.05
in g - r for example), which are statistically indistinguishable from that of
the Jupiter Trojans. Further, there is no evidence of correlation between color
and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters for the observed comets.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3999
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