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We report the results of a search for a dust trail aligned with the orbitplane of the large main-belt asteroid (24) Themis, which has been reported tohave water ice frost on its surface. Observations were obtained with the GMOSinstrument on the Gemini-North Observatory in imaging mode, where we used achip gap to block much of the light from the asteroid, allowing us to take longexposures while avoiding saturation by the object. No dust trail is detectedwithin 2' of Themis to a 3-sigma limiting surface brightness magnitude of 29.7mag/arcsec^2, as measured along the expected direction of the dust trail.Detailed consideration of dust ejection physics indicates that particles largeenough to form a detectable dust trail were unlikely to be ejected as a resultof sublimation from an object as large as Themis. We nonetheless demonstratethat our observations would have been capable of detecting faint dust emissionas close as 20" from the object, even in a crowded star field. This approachcould be used to conduct future searches for sublimation-generated dustemission from Themis or other large asteroids closer to perihelion than wasdone in this work. It would also be useful for deep imaging of collisionallygenerated dust emission from large asteroids at times when the visibility ofdust features are expected to be maximized, such as during orbit planecrossings, during close approaches to the Earth, or following detected impactevents.

Search for Dust Emission from (24) Themis Using the Gemini-North Telescope