Pre-discovery Activity of New Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov beyond 5 au

Comet 2I/Borisov, the first unambiguous interstellar comet ever found, was discovered in 2019 August at ∼3 au from the Sun on its inbound leg. No pre-discovery detection beyond 3 au has yet been reported, mostly due to the comet's proximity to the Sun as seen from the Earth. Here we present a s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astronomical journal 2020-02, Vol.159 (2), p.77
Main Authors: Ye, Quanzhi, Kelley, Michael S. P., Bolin, Bryce T., Bodewits, Dennis, Farnocchia, Davide, Masci, Frank J., Meech, Karen J., Micheli, Marco, Weryk, Robert, Bellm, Eric C., Christensen, Eric, Dekany, Richard, Delacroix, Alexandre, Graham, Matthew J., Kulkarni, Shrinivas R., Laher, Russ R., Rusholme, Ben, Smith, Roger M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Carbon dioxide
Comet nuclei
Comets
Crystallization
Ice
Image acquisition
Interstellar
Sky surveys (astronomy)
Small solar system bodies
Solar system
Solar system astronomy
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Summary:Comet 2I/Borisov, the first unambiguous interstellar comet ever found, was discovered in 2019 August at ∼3 au from the Sun on its inbound leg. No pre-discovery detection beyond 3 au has yet been reported, mostly due to the comet's proximity to the Sun as seen from the Earth. Here we present a search for pre-discovery detections of comet Borisov using images taken by the Catalina Sky Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), with a further comprehensive follow-up campaign being presented in Bolin et al. We identified comet Borisov in ZTF images taken in 2019 May and use these data to update its orbit. This allowed us to identify the comet in images acquired as far back as 2018 December, when it was 7.8 au from the Sun. The comet was not detected in 2018 November when it was 8.6 au from the Sun, possibly implying an onset of activity around this time. This suggests that the activity of the comet is either driven by a more volatile species other than H2O, such as CO or CO2, or by exothermic crystallization of amorphous ice. We derive the radius of the nucleus to be
ISSN:0004-6256
1538-3881
DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/ab659b