A Large Outburst, Coma Asymmetries, and the Color of Comet 243P/NEAT

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank K. Meech, who initially shared the 243P/NEAT outburst discovery with the Comet 46P/Wirtanen Campaign email list; M. Graham and E. Bellm, who kindly donated ARC telescope time; M. Knight and C. Holt, who assisted with the LDT observations; C.-S. Lin and M. Zhang, who assisted with the Lulin Observatory data; A. Gibbs, F. Shelly, and the Catalina Sky Survey project for supplying the 703 and G96 data and answering questions about the data; and J. Y. Li for sharing registered Deep Impact optical data.

M.S.P.K. and S.P. acknowledge funding from NASA (USA) Solar System Observations program grants NNX15AD99G and 80NSSC20K0673. Observations made by L.F. and T.F. were funded by NSF grant 1852589. Q.Y. was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) grant No. 1545949. C.-H.H. acknowledges support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for GRF research support under grants 17326116 and 17300417 and thanks Q. A. Parker and HKU for provision of his research post. B.T.B. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA.

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation (USA) under grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

This publication has made use of data collected at Lulin Observatory, partially supported by MoST grant 105-2112-M-008-024-MY3.

This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network operated by Las Cumbres Observatory.

The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) is funded by a NASA Near Earth Object Observations (NEOO) grant 80NSSC18K1130 to the University of Arizona.

These results made use of the Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory. Lowell is a private, nonprofit institution dedicated to astrophysical research and public appreciation of astronomy and operates the LDT in partnership with Boston University, the University of Maryland, the University of Toledo, Northern Arizona University, and Yale University. The Large Monolithic Imager was built by Lowell Observatory using funds provided by the National Science Foundation (AST-1005313).

TRAPPIST-North is a project funded by the University of Liege, in collaboration with the Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakesh (Morocco). TRAPPIST-South is a project funded by the Belgian Fonds (National) de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) under grant PDR T.0120.21. E.J is an F.R.S.-FNRS Senior Research Associate.

The operation of Xingming Observatory and the NEXT telescope was made possible by the generous support from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory and the Ningbo Bureau of Education.

This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Our work is partially based on observations obtained with the Apache Point Observatory 3.5 m telescope, which is owned and operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium. We thank the Director (Nancy Chanover) and Deputy Director (Ben Williams) of the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) 3.5 m telescope at Apache Point Observatory for their enthusiastic and timely support of our Director’s Discretionary Time (DDT) proposals. We also thank Russet McMillan and the rest of the APO technical staff for their assistance in performing the observations just 2 days after our DDT proposals were submitted. B.T.B. would like to acknowledge the generous support of the B612 Foundation and its Asteroid Institute program. B.T.B. wishes to acknowledge the support of the Data Intensive Research in Astronomy and Cosmology (DIRAC) Institute at the University of Washington.

Funding for the Asteroid Institute program is provided by the B612 Foundation, the W. K. Bowes Jr. Foundation, the P. Rawls Family Fund, and two anonymous donors, in addition to general support from the B612 Founding Circle (K. Algeri-Wong, B. Anders, G. Baehr, B. Burton, A. Carlson, D. Carlson, S. Cerf, V. Cerf, Y. Chapman, J. Chervenak, D. Corrigan, E. Corrigan, A. Denton, E. Dyson, A. Eustace, S. Galitsky, The Gillikin Family, E. Gillum, L. Girand, Glaser Progress Foundation, D. Glasgow, J. Grimm, S. Grimm, G. Gruener, V. K. Hsu & Sons Foundation Ltd., J. Huang, J. D. Jameson, J. Jameson, M. Jonsson Family Foundation, S. Jurvetson, D. Kaiser, S. Krausz, J. Leszczenski, D. Liddle, S. Mak, G.McAdoo, S. McGregor, J. Mercer, M. Mullenweg, D. Murphy, P. Norvig, S. Pishevar, R. Quindlen, N. Ramsey, R. Rothrock, E. Sahakian, R. Schweickart, A. Slater, T. Trueman, F. B. Vaughn, R. C. Vaughn, B. Wheeler, Y. Wong, M. Wyndowe, plus six anonymous donors).

This research made use of the Horizons online ephemeris system developed and operated by the Solar System Dynamics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Facilities

PO:1.2 m - , IRSA - , Hale - Palomar Observatory's 5.1m Hale Telescope, IRTF - Infrared Telescope Facility, ATLAS - , LCOGT - Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, TRAPPIST - , XMO:NEXT - , LO:1 m - , LDT - , Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) 3.5m Telescope At Apache Point Observatory (APO) - , SO:Schmidt - , SO:1.5m - Steward Observatory's 1.5 meter NASA Telescope.

Software References

acronym (K. L. Weisenburger et al. 2017), astroimagej (K. A. Collins et al. 2017) astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), calviacat (M. S. P. Kelley & T. Lister 2019), dct-redux (M. S. P. Kelley 2024), IRAF (D. Tody 1986), photometrypipeline (M. Mommert 2017), pycometsuite (M. S. P. Kelley 2023b), pyfits (P. Barrett et al. 2012), sbpy (M. Mommert et al. 2019), scipy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020), SEP (K. Barbary 2018), SExtractor (E. Bertin & S. Arnouts 1996), synphot (STScI development Team 2018)