Elemental and molecular abundances in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

By M. Rubin, K. Altwegg, H. Balsiger, J. Berthelier, M. Combi, J. De Keyser, M. Drozdovskaya, B. Fiethe, S. Fuselier, S. Gasc and 11 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019

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Comets are considered to be some of the most pristine and unprocessed Solar system objects accessible to in situ exploration. Investigating their molecular and elemental composition takes us on a journey back to the early period of our Solar system and possibly even further. In this work, we deduce the bulk abundances of the major volatile species in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission. The basis are measurements obtained with the ROSINA instrument suite on board the Rosetta orbiter during a suitable period of high outgassing near perihelion. The results are combined with both gas and dust composition measurements published in the literature. This provides an integrated inventory of the major elements present in the nucleus of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Similar to comet 1P/Halley, which was visited by ESA’s Giotto spacecraft in 1986, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko also shows near-solar abundances of oxygen and carbon, whereas hydrogen and nitrogen are depleted compared to solar. Still, the degree of devolatilization is lower than that of inner Solar system objects, including meteorites and the Earth. This supports the idea that comets are amongst the most pristine objects in our Solar system.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb4a715842751acdc21bc713451a472b71c5ca0f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Bergin
2. K. Oberg
3. N. Madhusudhan
4. R. Garrod
5. E. Dishoeck
6. P. Caselli
7. Cecilia Ceccarelli
8. S. Glover

Citations in the corpus

• Astrochemistry and compositions of planetary systems (2020, background): “…as little as 1 in 10,000 carbon atoms available at formation (Table 20 Finocchi et al. 1997; Lee et al. 2010; Pontoppidan et al. 2014) and CI chondrites, which formed in the inner Solar Nebula, are significantly carbon-depleted (Geiss and Reeves 1972; Bergin et al. 2015; Rubin et al. 2019).”