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Evidence for Fragmentation of Strongly Nonspherical Dust Particles in the Tail of Comet West 1976 VI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2015

Z. Sekanina  and
J. A. Farrell
Z. Sekanina
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
J. A. Farrell
Affiliation:
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, University of California Los Alamos, New Mexico, U.S.A.

Extract

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Following Sekanina's (1976a,b) suggestion that striae (also known as “synchronic” or pseudosynchronic bands) observed in the dust tails of several comets could be products of fragmentation of friable dust particles ejected from the nucleus, we have completed an investigation of these structures in Comet West 1976 VI (Sekanina and Farrell 1979, detailed paper in preparation), which shows that the dynamical solutions, provided by the fragmentation model on the assumption that solar attraction and radiation pressure are the only forces involved, are indeed in agreement with the observed motions of 16 striae through the tail over a time interval of more than three days. The match is so good that the probability of its being a coincidence of some sort must be virtually nil.

Type
III: The Interplanetary Dust Complex 1. Sources, Evolution, and Dynamics
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 90: Solid Particles in the Solar System , 1980 , pp. 267 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1980 

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