Cometary Dust

Anny Chantal Levasseur-Regourd (1) , Jessica Agarwal (2) , Hervé Cottin (3) , Cécile Engrand (4) , George Flynn (5) , Marco Fulle (6) , Tamas I. Gombosi (7) , Yves Langevin (8) , Jérémie Lasue (9) , Thurid Mannel (10, 11) , Sihane Merouane (2) , Olivier Poch (12) , Nicolas Thomas (13) , Andrew Westphal (14)

1 PLANETO - LATMOS
2 MPS - Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung = Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
3 LISA (UMR_7583) - Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques
4 CSNSM - Centre de Spectrométrie Nucléaire et de Spectrométrie de Masse
5 SUNY Plattsburgh - State University of New York at Plattsburgh
6 OAT - INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste
7 CLaSP - Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
8 IAS - Institut d'astrophysique spatiale
9 IRAP - Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie
10 Institute of Physics [Graz]
11 IWF - Space Research Institute of Austrian Academy of Sciences
12 IPAG - Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble
13 Physikalisches Institut [Bern]
14 SSL - Space Sciences Laboratory [Berkeley]

This review presents our understanding of cometary dust at the end of 2017. For decades, insight about the dust ejected by nuclei of comets had stemmed from remote observations from Earth or Earth’s orbit, and from flybys, including the samples of dust returned to Earth for laboratory studies by the Stardust return capsule. The long-duration Rosetta mission has recently provided a huge and unique amount of data, obtained using numerous instruments, including innovative dust instruments, over a wide range of distances from the Sun and from the nucleus. The diverse approaches available to study dust in comets, together with the related theoretical and experimental studies, provide evidence of the composition and physical properties of dust particles, e.g., the presence of a large fraction of carbon in macromolecules, and of aggregates on a wide range of scales. The results have opened vivid discussions on the variety of dust-release processes and on the diversity of dust properties in comets, as well as on the formation of cometary dust, and on its presence in the near-Earth interplanetary medium. These discussions stress the significance of future explorations as a way to decipher the formation and evolution of our Solar System.

Keywords: Dust; Comets; Jupiter-family comets; Organics; Aggregates; Rosetta; Stardust; Coma; Nucleus; Trail

Domains: Astrophysics [astro-ph]

Anny Chantal Levasseur-Regourd, Jessica Agarwal, Hervé Cottin, Cécile Engrand, George Flynn, et al.. Cometary Dust. Space Science Reviews, 2018, 214 (3), pp.64. ⟨10.1007/s11214-018-0496-3⟩. ⟨insu-01755520⟩