Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, London W1J 0BQ
8 March 2013, 10:30 – 15:30.
Comets have played an important role in the formation and evolution of the planets, through bombardment of their surfaces and consequent delivery of volatile species to those bodies. Such impacts occur remarkably frequently even today as evidenced by the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event at Jupiter in 1994, and recent discoveries of impact plumes in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Even without impacts, close approaches of fragile cometary nuclei to massive bodies often causes their tidal disruption. The recently-revealed existence of main belt comets partly results from their collisions with other minor bodies. 2011-12 yielded an unexpected wealth of data and theory on the destructive interaction between comets and the inner solar atmosphere (eg. Brown et al. 2011, A&A 535, A71). SDO yielded detailed EUV observations of the demise of small comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO) in the low solar corona (Schrijver et al. 2012, Science 335, 324), while the spectacular near-destruction there of the much larger sun-grazer Comet Lovejoy was observed over a wide wavelength range. At this meeting, we shall review recent progress in understanding comets’ interactions with other bodies and their atmospheres, and what we have learnt about the solar atmosphere, planets, and comets themselves through these interactions.
We welcome abstracts for presentations at the meeting within all the areas covered above; please send your abstracts to all three conveners below at your earliest convenience.
Organised by:
Dr Geraint Jones (MSSL-UCL/Centre for Planetary Sciences at
UCL/Birkbeck) g.h.jones@ucl.ac.uk
Professor John Brown (University of Glasgow) john.brown@glasgow.ac.uk
Dr Stephen C. Lowry (University of Kent) s.c.lowry@kent.ac.uk… continue to the full article