Abstract
The discovery of Comet IRAS–Araki–Alcock provided the first opportunity for studying a comet at a distance of 4.5 × 106 km from the Earth, thus allowing a spatial resolution of ∼20 km to be achieved. Photographic and spectroscopic plates obtained on 9.9 UT May 1983 using the 90-cm Schmidt and the 182-cm Coper-nicus telescopes at the Asiago Observatory have revealed new fundamental discoveries. The photometric data system (PDS)-elaborated Schmidt plates show that the inner coma of the comet is directed towards the Sun with an inclination of ∼30°, a phenomenon probably due to the rotation of the nucleus. On the spectroscopic plates taken with the grating spectrograph in the spectral range 3,800–8,500 Å with a resolution of 6 Å, 450 lines can be distinguished, although 90 lines are still unidentified. After detailed analysis, we have identified the molecules HCO and H2S+ which have never before been observed in the visible part of the spectrum of any astronomical object. We suspect that H2CO, DCO, S2 and NH4 are also present. We report here only the preliminary results from our spectroscopic data.
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Cosmovici, C., Ortolani, S. Detection of new molecules in the visible spectrum of Comet IRAS–Araki–Alcock (1983 d). Nature 310, 122–124 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/310122a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/310122a0
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