nai

Project Progress

The recent discovery of three icy asteroids with comet-like appearance has suggested that a new class of objects known as Main Belt Comets may exist in the asteroid belt. These water-carrying asteroids could have played an important role in the delivery of water to the Earth. Haghighipour has an expansive and on-going project on the formation and dynamics of MBCs. Haghighipour’s research has shown that MBCs have formed in-situ, as members of asteroid families (e.g., Themis family), in the outer half of the asteroid belt. The results of his simulations have confirmed the idea that the comet-like activities of MBCs are due to the sublimation of subsurface water ice that has been exposed after small meter-sized objects hit MBCs. Haghighipour’s simulations have also made predictions of the regions where these objects have high probability of detection (figure 1). In general asteroid families with large hydrated parent bodies capable of differentiation are the most favorable places, although interactions with giant planets may scatter MBCs to isolated orbits elsewhere in the asteroid belt as well. Haghighipour has also been involved in the discovery of the fourth MBC, which was announced earlier this year in a paper in the Astronomical Journal co-authored with Jewitt, and Yang. In regard to the origin of Earth’s water, MBCs, as water-carrying asteroids, are of particular importance since their small sizes makes them easy to be scattered to other regions of the asteroid belt. Haghighipour’s simulations portray a coherent picture of the scattering of these objects and their contributions to water on the Earth.