Dust Environment Model of the Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov

Abstract 2I/Borisov is the first interstellar comet discovered on 2019 August 30, and it soon showed a coma and a dust tail. This study reports the results of images obtained at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo telescope, on La Palma—Canary Islands, in 2019 November and December. The images have been obtained with the R filter in order to apply our dust tail model. The model has been applied to the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and compared to the Rosetta dust measurements showing a very good agreement. It has been applied to the comet 2I/Borisov, using almost the same parameters, obtaining a dust environment similar to that of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, suggesting that the activity may be very similar. The dust tail analysis provided a dust-loss rate Q d ≈ 35 kg s −1 in 2019 November and Q d ≈ 30 kg s −1 in 2019 December.