Pith Number

pith:QUQF2TZN

pith:2026:QUQF2TZNPHXORPAWP63Q654Y3I

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Long-term outburst activity of comet 17P/Holmes and constraints on ejecta size distributions

Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, Jorma Ryske, Josep M. Trigo-Rodr\'iguez, Marcin Weso{\l}owski, Maria Gritsevich, Markku Nissinen, Peter Carson

Comet 17P/Holmes outbursts reveal that brightness depends on the number and size distribution of ejected particles rather than total mass.

arxiv:2603.17130 v3 · 2026-03-17 · astro-ph.EP · astro-ph.IM · physics.data-an · physics.geo-ph · physics.pop-ph

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Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{QUQF2TZNPHXORPAWP63Q654Y3I}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

The inferred particle size distribution is consistent with a power law of index q, yielding effective particle sizes between 10^-6 m for q = 4 and 5 x 10^-3 m for q = 2. ... cometary outburst brightness is determined primarily by the number of particles and their size distribution, rather than by the total ejected mass alone.

C2weakest assumption

In the absence of direct measurements of particle sizes, assumptions about the size distribution play a central role in modelling dust-trail formation, their dynamical evolution and observability.

C3one line summary

Brightness data from comet 17P/Holmes outbursts constrain ejected particle sizes to follow power-law distributions with index q from 2 to 4, showing that outburst brightness depends primarily on particle number and size distribution rather than total ejected mass.

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-03T14:05:46.794167Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

85205d4f2d79eee8bc167fb70f7798da0a69970717ce8dd6c619e8a210d0d23c

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.17130 · arxiv_version: 2603.17130v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.17130 · pith_short_12: QUQF2TZNPHXO · pith_short_16: QUQF2TZNPHXORPAW · pith_short_8: QUQF2TZN

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/QUQF2TZNPHXORPAWP63Q654Y3I \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 85205d4f2d79eee8bc167fb70f7798da0a69970717ce8dd6c619e8a210d0d23c

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "cfb67df119b37b951428e9bbd3ad0093752bdae4e8f642338d7c53f5617703ba",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.IM",
      "physics.data-an",
      "physics.geo-ph",
      "physics.pop-ph"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.EP",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-17T20:43:04Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "a979f7fb899932d616d3e5c8d3a160bee3d4e12164451c70af34bedc6fdec9c9"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.17130",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}