Study of the forbidden oxygen lines in a dozen comets observed at the VLT (ESO)

The forbidden lines are difficult to analyse because their detection requires high spectral and spatial resolutions. Their analysis is however interesting because it allows the determination of the spatial distribution and the production rate of the parent molecules, supposedly H2O which doesn't have any feature in the optical range. But as shown by Cochran [2] [3], some issues remain about the nature of the parents of the oxygen atoms. Moreover the width of the green line was found larger than that of the red lines. One of the goals of this study is to determine the parent species that photo-dissociate to produce oxygen atoms and see how this process depends on the heliocentric distance. We present here the results of the analysis of a homogeneous set of high quality spectra of 13 different comets observed with UVES at the ESO VLT since 2002 [4] [5].