Recurrent Activity from Active Asteroid (248370) 2005 QN₁₇₃: A Main-belt Comet

Journal Article · Wed Nov 17 00:00:00 EST 2021 · The Astrophysical Journal. Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac365b· OSTI ID:1983317

Chandler, Colin Orion  ^[1]; Trujillo, Chadwick A.  ^[1]; Hsieh, Henry H.  ^[2]

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1. Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ (United States)
2. Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ (United States); Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)

We present archival observations of main-belt asteroid (248370) 2005 QN₁₇₃ (also designated 433P) that demonstrate this recently discovered active asteroid (a body with a dynamically asteroidal orbit displaying a tail or coma) has had at least one additional apparition of activity near perihelion during a prior orbit. We discovered evidence of this second activity epoch in an image captured 2016 July 22 with the DECam on the 4 m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. As of this writing, (248370) 2005 QN₁₇₃ is just the eighth active asteroid demonstrated to undergo recurrent activity near perihelion. Our analyses demonstrate (248370) 2005 QN₁₇₃ is likely a member of the active asteroid subset known as main-belt comets, a group of objects that orbit in the main asteroid belt that exhibit activity that is specifically driven by sublimation. We implement an activity detection technique, wedge photometry, that has the potential to detect tails in images of solar system objects and quantify their agreement with computed antisolar and antimotion vectors normally associated with observed tail directions. We present a catalog and an image gallery of archival observations. The object will soon become unobservable as it passes behind the Sun as seen from Earth, and when it again becomes visible (late 2022) it will be farther than 3 au from the Sun. Our findings suggest (248370) 2005 QN₁₇₃ is most active interior to 2.7 au (0.3 au from perihelion), so we encourage the community to observe and study this special object before 2021 December.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Scientific User Facilities (SUF); National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; AST-0950945
• OSTI ID: 1983317
• Journal Information: The Astrophysical Journal. Letters, Vol. 922, Issue 1; ISSN 2041-8205
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Asteroids
Main belt asteroids
Comae
Comets
Comet tails
Astronomy data analysis
Comet volatiles
Main-belt comets
Computational methods