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Explosion of Comet 17P/Holmes as revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope

An explosion on comet 17P/Holmes occurred on 2007 Oct 23, projecting particulate debris of a wide range of sizes into the interplanetary medium. We observed the comet using the Spitzer spectrograph on 2007 Nov 10 and 2008 Feb 27, and the photometer, on 2008 Mar 13. The fresh ejecta have detailed mineralogical features from small crystalline silicate grains. The 2008 Feb 27 spectra, and the central core of the 2007 Nov 10 spectral map, reveal nearly featureless spectra, due to much larger grains that were ejected from the nucleus more slowly. We break the infrared image into three components (size, speed) that also explain the temporal evolution of the mm-wave flux. Optical images were obtained on multiple dates spanning 2007 Oct 27 to 2008 Mar 10 at the Holloway Comet Observatory and 1.5-m telescope at Palomar Observatory. The orientation of the leading edge of the ejecta shell and the ejecta blob, relative to the nucleus, do not change as the orientation of the Sun changes; instead, the configuration was imprinted by the orientation of the initial explosion. The kinetic energy of the ejecta >1e21 erg is greater than the gravitational binding energy of the nucleus. We model the explosion as being due to crystallization and release of volatiles from interior amorphous ice within a subsurface cavity; once the pressure in the cavity exceeded the surface strength, the material above the cavity was propelled from the comet. The size of the cavity and the tensile strength of the upper layer of the nucleus are constrained by the observed properties of the ejecta; tensile strengths on >10 m scale must be greater than 10 kPa. The appearance of the 2007 outburst is similar to that witnessed in 1892, but the 1892 explosion was less energetic by a factor of about 20.