Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 469, Issue -, Pages S818-S823Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx3359
Keywords
comets: general; comets: individual: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko; methods:laboratory; ISM: molecules
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Funding
- Israel Ministry of Science and Technology and Space through the Israel Space Agency [3-11480]
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One of the most surprising measurements of the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was the detection of O-2 along with N-2 and noble gases which were measured for the first time in comets, along with the major constituents, water, CO, and CO2. The O-2 high abundance of 1-10 per cent relative to H2O was calculated, with an average value of 3.80 +/- 0.85 per cent (Bieler et al. 2015). The strong correlation of molecular oxygen abundance with water, suggests the formation of O-2 by radiolysis or photolysis of water molecules and the trapping of O-2 in the amorphous ice, together with the other gases while the comet was formed. In this study, we present new experimental results for trapping O-2 with N-2 and Ar in amorphous ice in order to understand the direct measurements of the Rosetta spacecraft. The discovery of O-2 in comets challenges our understanding of the composition of the volatiles in the outskirts of the young solar system and their delivery to the Earth's atmosphere.
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