Search for OH 18-cm radio emission from 1I/2017 U1 with the Green Bank telescope

Ryan S. Park, D. J. Pisano, T. Joseph W. Lazio, Paul W. Chodas, Shantanu P. Naidu
(Submitted on 27 Mar 2018)

This paper reports the first OH 18-cm line observation of the first detected interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua) using the Green Bank Telescope. We have observed the OH lines at 1665.402 MHz, 1667.359, and 1720.53 MHz frequencies with a spectral resolution of 357 Hz (approximately 0.06 km-s^{-1}). At the time of the observation, `Oumuamua was at topocentric distance and velocity of 1.07 au and 63.4 km-s^{-1}, respectively, or at heliocentric distance and velocity of 1.8 au and 39 km-s^{-1}, respectively. Based on a detailed data reduction and an analogy-based inversion, our final results confirm the asteroidal origin of `Oumuamua (as discussed in Meech et al., 2017) with an upper bound of OH production of Q[OH] < 0.17 x 10^{28} s^{-1}.

Comments:    accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal, 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1803.10187 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1803.10187v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Ryan Park
[v1] Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:15:28 GMT (260kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10187