演講資訊

摘要：

As a newly recognized class of objects exhibiting apparently cometary (sublimation-driven) activity yet orbiting completely within the main asteroid belt, main-belt comets (MBCs) have revealed the existence of present-day ice, presumed to be water ice, in small bodies in the inner solar system and offer an opportunity to better understand the thermal and compositional history of our solar system, and by extension, those of other planetary systems as well. Achieving these overall goals, however, will require first meeting several intermediate research objectives, including discovering many more MBCs to better constrain the population's abundance and distribution, confirming that water ice sublimation is in fact the driver of activity in these objects, and improving our understanding of the physical, dynamical, and thermal evolutionary processes that have acted on this population over the age of the solar system. I will review past and ongoing work pursuing these research goals, and detail potential future research directions that could prove fruitful for this still-nascent field of study.