Possible Disintegration of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)
ATel #13620; Quanzhi Ye (U. Maryland), Qicheng Zhang (Caltech)
on 6 Apr 2020; 17:12 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Comets
Credential Certification: Quanzhi Ye (qye@umd.edu)
We report the possible disintegration of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), revealed by the public monitoring program carried out by the 0.6-m Ningbo Education Xinjiang Telescope (NEXT). Images taken on UT 2020 April 5.6-5.9 showed an elongated pseudo-nucleus measuring about 3 arcsec in length and aligned with the axis of the tail, a morphology consistent with a sudden decline or cessation of dust production, as would be expected from a major disruption of the nucleus. The elongation is grossly consistent with the roughly +5" in RA, -1" in Dec astrometric residuals currently (as of MPEC 2020-G65) being reported relative to JPL orbit solution #5, implying a relative projected motion of order 5-10 m/s from the original nucleus' orbit. A disruption event could also potentially explain the large non-gravitational forces acting on the comet, as reported in CBET 4744. Composite stacks of 10 x 30-s r-filtered frames illustrating the change in morphology from April 2 to 5 can be found at https://near.earth/shared/2020/04/next_20200405.png. (The images from both days were obtained without comet-rate tracking, but the exposure was sufficiently short that the trailing of the comet due to its non-sidereal motion is only 1.3 pixel, much shorter than the elongation of the pseudo-nucleus. The direction of the trailing is also at a ~30 deg angle to the long-axis of the elongated pseudo-nucleus.)
We thank Man-To Hui and Xing Gao for discussion and assistance in obtaining the NEXT data.
