Faculty Sponsor

Dr Erika Gibb

Final Abstract for URS Program

Our solar system is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Comets are remnants of its formation, serving as time capsules to give us an understanding of its natal heritage. Revealing our own solar system’s history allows us to gain insights into other young stellar systems and the potential for life elsewhere. C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) was a comet from the Oort cloud on its first and possibly only journey to the inner solar system. The comet grew in brightness until it was brighter than Venus on October 9th, 2024, making it temporarily brighter than Venus and one of the brightest comets of the past century. Dubbed the Great Comet of 2024 by NASA because it was easily visible to the naked eye, comet A3 renewed public interest in comets. We conducted spectroscopic observations of comet A3 on October 1st, 2024, using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We used the Band 8 receiver centered near 460 GHz, sampling thermal continuum emission from the nucleus and dust in the coma, as well as spectral line emission from CH3OH (methanol), SO (sulfur monoxide), and NH2D (ammonia). We detected continuum emission but did not detect spectral line emission. We modeled the continuum properties of the dust coma following the methods of previous studies at millimeter wavelengths. We will compare our upper limits on molecular abundances in A3 against other compositional studies which determined it to be depleted in carbon-chain molecules and will discuss our calculated dust mass and upper limits on the size of the nucleus.

Presentation Type

Oral Presentation

Document Type

Article

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