Monte Carlo Models of Comet Dust Tails Observed from the Ground

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Dust particles leaving the comet nucleus surface are entrained by the gas within the first few nuclear radius distances and are subjected to a complex hydrodynamical environment. From distances of about 20 nuclear radii outwards, the particles decouple from the accelerating gas and are mainly affected by solar gravity and radiation pressure for small-sized nuclei. Their motion is then a function of their so-called β parameter, which is the ratio of the radiation pressure force to gravity force, and their velocity when the gas drag vanishes. At a given observation time, the position of those particles projected on the sky plane form the coma, tail and trail structures that can be observed from ground-based or space-borne instrumentation. Monte Carlo models, based on the computer simulation of the Keplerian trajectories of a large set of dust particles, provide the best possible approach to extract the dust environment parameters from the observed scattered solar light or thermal emission. In this paper, we describe the Monte Carlo code along with some successful applications of such technique to a number of targets. © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, SwitzerlandThis research was founded by the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709), the Spanish Plan Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica through LEONIDAS project RTI2018-095330-B-100, and the Junta de Andalucía P18-RT-1854 project.Peer reviewe