Abstract
Comets are the most primordial objects in our solar system. Comets are icy bodies that release gas and dust when moving close to the Sun. The C/2020 F3 (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer: NEOWISE) is a nearly isotropic comet moving near-parabolic orbit. The C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) was the brightest comet in the northern hemisphere after comet Hale–Bopp in 1997 and comet McNaught in 2006. This paper presents the first interferometric high-resolution detection of the comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT). We detected the radio continuum emission from the comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) with a flux density level 2.84 (±0.56)–3.89 (±0.57) mJy in the frequency range of 1050–1450 MHz. We also detected the absorption line of atomic hydrogen (HI) with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) \(\sim \)5.7. The column density of the detected HI absorption line is \(N_{\textrm{HI}} = (3.46\pm 0.60)\times (T_{s}/100)\times 10^{21}\,\hbox {cm}^{-2}\), where we assume the spin temperature \(T_{s} = 100\) K and filling factor \(f = 1\). The significant detection of continuum emission from the comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) at \(\sim \)21 cm wavelength indicated that it arose from the large icy grains halo (IGH) region.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments that improved the manuscript. AM acknowledges the Swami Vivekananda Merit cum Means Scholarship (SVMCM), Government of West Bengal, India, for the financial support of this research. The plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. We thank the staff of GMRT for their assistance. We acknowledge Ruta Kale for her support during the observation of the comet NEOWISE. The raw data of NEOWISE reported in this paper are available through the GMRT archive with the proposal code ddtC141. This radio telescope is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, which is part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
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Pal, S., Manna, A. Detection of continuum emission and atomic hydrogen from comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE using GMRT. J Astrophys Astron 45, 10 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-024-09998-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-024-09998-4