Ensemble properties of comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present the ensemble properties of 31 comets (27 resolved and 4 unresolved) observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This sample of comets represents about 1 comet per 10 million SDSS photometric objects. Five-band (u, g, r, i, z) photometry is used to determine the comets’ colors, sizes, surface brightness profiles, and rates of dust production in terms of the Afρ formalism. We find that the cumulative luminosity function for the Jupiter Family Comets in our sample is well fit by a power law of the form N(<H) ∝ 10(0.49±0.05)H for H < 18, with evidence of a much shallower fit N(<H) ∝ 10(0.19±0.03)H for the faint (14.5 < H < 18) comets. The resolved comets show an extremely narrow distribution of colors (0.57 ± 0.05 in g − r for example), which are statistically indistinguishable from that of the Jupiter Trojans. Further, there is no evidence of correlation between color and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters for the observed comets.