Search results for "Isophote"

HST observation of the inner coma of 2060 chiron

1995

Abstract The analysis of persistent comae of very large and distant comets allows us to infer the poorly known physical properties of dust and icy grains produced beyond Jupiter. Chiron is particularly interesting because Fulle ( Astron. Astrophys. 282 , 980–988; 1994) has shown that the strong asymmetricity of its coma (West, Astron. Astrophys. 241 , 635–645 1991) allows us to infer rotational properties of Chiron's nucleus. In this paper we report the observation of the asymmetric inner coma of Chiron from the analysis of 44 images of Chiron and eight images of a standard star available from the HST archive. The images were taken during February/March 1993, when Ch iron was 9.3 AU from th…