Dust Production Rates in Jupiter-family Comets. II. Trends and Population Insights from ATLAS Photometry of 116 JFCs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) have orbital periods of less than 20 yr and therefore undergo more frequent sublimation compared to other comet populations. The JFCs therefore represent the ideal dynamical population for investigating the dust production rates at high cadence. We analyzed observations by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) of 74 JFCs that reached perihelion in 2022 and 2023. The work contained in this study builds on our previous work, for a total of 116 JFCs over a 4 yr period. Using the Afρ parameter, we measured the dust production rates of each JFC as a function of heliocentric distance. We found that there remained a clear preference for JFCs to reach their maximum A (0°) fρ post-perihelion, with 170P/Christensen, 254P/McNaught, and P/2020 WJ5 (Lemmon) reaching a maximum A (0°) fρ between 200 and 400 days after perihelion. However, all JFCs reached their maximum dust production within 10% of their orbital period relative to perihelion. Fitting A (0°) fρ as a function of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo> <mml:msub> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>R</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>h</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> <mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:math> , we measured statistically significant differences in the distribution of pre-perihelion and post-perihelion activity index n , with average activity indices of −5.2 ± 4.5 and −3.2 ± 2.7, respectively. We derived upper limits for the nuclear radii of comets 444P/WISE-PANSTARRS and 459P/Catalina as R n ≤ 1.5 ± 0.2 km and R n ≤ 1.7 ± 0.1 km, respectively. We measured six outbursts in comets 97P/Metcalf-Brewington, 99P/Kowal 1, 118P/Shoemaker-Levy 4, 285P/LINEAR, and 382P/Larson. From our 4 yr of observing JFC outbursts in the ATLAS data, the average increase in magnitude was −1.3 ± 0.8.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".