Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Aging Comets And Their Meteor Showers, Quanzhi Ye

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Comets are thought to be responsible for the terrestrial accretion of water and organic materials. Comets evolve very quickly, and will generally deplete their volatiles in a few hundred revolutions. This process, or the aging of comets, is one of the most critical yet poorly understood problems in planetary astronomy. The goal of this thesis is to better understand this problem by examining different parts of the cometary aging spectrum of Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), a group of comets that dominates the cometary influx in the near-Earth space, using both telescopic and meteor observations. We examine two representative JFCs and the …