Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Pierce, Donna

Committee Member

Tanner, Angelle

Committee Member

Wang, Chuji

Date of Degree

5-7-2016

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Physics and Astronomy

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

Understanding the chemical composition of comets is of great interest to the scientific community. In this work, an integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph is used to detect emissions of C2, C3, CH, CN, and NH2. The azimuthal average profile (line integral of the column density as a function of radial distance from the center of the nucleus) is simulated by the Haser model. The Haser model simulates the outgassing and photo-dissociate of molecular species in the coma. In this work, the lifetime of the parent molecule in the photo-dissociation chain is set as a free parameter. The best fit parent lifetimes for observations of comets 4P/Faye, 10P/Tempel 2, and C/2009 P1 Garradd are obtained. The results are compared to parent lifetimes cited in other studies. HCN as a likely dominant parent for CN is eliminated. Constraints on likely parent molecules for C3 and NH2 are discussed.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/17561

Comments

comae||comets

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