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Detecting active comets in the SDSS |
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| Authors: | Michael Solontoi ?eljko Ivezi? Mark Claire Andrew Becker Patrick B. Hall Robert H. Lupton Tom Quinn Don Schneider |
| Affiliation: | a University of Washington, Department of Astronomy, Box 351580, Seattle, WA 98195, USA b MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA c Princeton University Observatory, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA d Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3 e Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510, USA f Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA |
| Abstract: | Using a sample of serendipitously discovered active comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we develop well-controlled selection criteria for greatly increasing the efficiency of comet identification in the SDSS catalogs. After follow-up visual inspection of images to reject remaining false positives, the total sample of SDSS comets presented here contains 19 objects, roughly one comet per 10 million other SDSS objects. The good understanding of selection effects allows a study of the population statistics, and we estimate the apparent magnitude distribution to r∼18, the ecliptic latitude distribution, and the comet distribution in SDSS color space. The most surprising results are the extremely narrow range of colors for comets in our sample (e.g. root-mean-square scatter of only ∼0.06 mag for the g-r color), and the similarity of comet colors to those of jovian Trojans. We discuss the relevance of our results for upcoming deep multi-epoch optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and estimate that LSST may produce a sample of about 10,000 comets over its 10-year lifetime. |
| Keywords: | Comets Photometry Comets, Coma |
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