Meteor showers in review

doi:10.1016/j.pss.2017.01.008

Planetary and Space Science

Volume 143, 1 September 2017, Pages 116-124

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2017.01.008 Get rights and content

Abstract

Recent work on meteor showers is reviewed. New data is presented on the long duration showers that wander in sun-centered ecliptic coordinates. Since the early days of meteor photography, much progress has been made in mapping visual meteor showers, using low-light video cameras instead. Now, some 820,000 meteoroid orbits have been measured by four orbit surveys during 2007–2015. Mapped in sun-centered ecliptic coordinates in 5° intervals of solar longitude, the data show a number of long duration (>15 days) meteor showers that have drifting radiants and speeds with solar longitude. 18 showers emerge from the antihelion source and follow a drift pattern towards high ecliptic latitudes. 27 Halley-type showers in the apex source move mostly towards lower ecliptic longitudes, but those at high ecliptic latitudes move backwards. Also, 5 low-speed showers appear between the toroidal ring and the apex source, moving towards the antihelion source. Most other showers do not last long, or do not move much in sun-centered ecliptic coordinates. The surveys also detected episodic showers, which mostly document the early stages of meteoroid stream formation. New data on the sporadic background have shed light on the dynamical evolution of the zodiacal cloud.

Introduction

A working list of meteor showers is maintained at the International Astronomical Union's Meteor Data Center (Jopek and Kanuchova, in this issue). At the time of writing, 701 proposed showers are catalogued, of which 112 meteor showers are certain to exist. Of those, only 32 have known parent bodies. Efforts are underway to identify more (e.g., Kholshevnikov et al., 2016; Micheli et al., 2016).

It is important to better document these showers, and search for more, because meteor showers provide a unique record of past comet activity. They document the meteoroid stream dynamics that will result ultimately in replenishing the zodiacal dust cloud. For reviews, see Jenniskens, 2006, Jenniskens, 2015a, Jenniskens, 2016b) and Williams and Jopek (2014).

Fundamental questions remain. Comet disruptions are the main mass-loss mechanism of comets contributing to meteoroid streams and the zodiacal cloud (Jenniskens, 2008a, Jenniskens, 2008b, Nesvorny et al., 2010, Nesvorny et al., 2011, Yang and Ishiguro, 2015, Ye et al., 2015b), but what are the velocity dispersions that result from that? On what timescale do comets disrupt? When did individual streams form? What are the long-term dynamical and physical processes that form the zodiacal cloud? Even the collisional lifetime of meteoroids is uncertain (Jenniskens et al., 2016c).

To find answers to these questions, meteoroid streams at Earth need to be charted and modeled to explain all observed shower features. With each triangulated meteor that provides entry speed and approach direction (the radiant), a new dot is placed on a map that gradually brings out the meteor showers. The showers are best recognized after removing the Earth's motion, by subtracting the solar longitude from the ecliptic longitude of the radiant to calculate sun-centered ecliptic coordinates (Fig. 1).

It is also important to map these showers at different particle sizes. There are striking differences between maps derived from radar and optical observations, which provide clues to the forces and disintegration mechanisms at work. Water vapor drag during ejection and the Poynting-Robertson drag, for example, are particle size dependent.

Since the last Meteoroids meeting in Poznan in 2013, a large number of newly detected meteor showers have been reported. Several exceptional meteor showers have occurred. Progress has been made in understanding meteoroid stream evolution and the dynamics of the sporadic background. A few more parent bodies have been identified. Many questions remain. This review will highlight some of the advances, present some new results regarding long-lasting showers, and reflect on outstanding problems.

Section snippets

Methods: the meteor shower sky at different meteoroid sizes

At peak visual magnitudes brighter than −12, roughly corresponding to masses above ~10 kg and diameters above 20 cm, meteors are mostly due to the impact of asteroidal matter (Borovicka et al., 2015). Less than 100 of such fireball trajectories have been published. In addition, satellite-derived data has been released that pertain to meter-class impacts (Brown et al., 2016). Based on some orbit pairings, newly discovered meteoroid streams have been proposed and linked to near-Earth asteroids,

Results: the newly identified wandering showers

Fig. 1 illustrates the sad state of affairs ten years ago, when many proposed meteor showers were based only on alignments of a handful of meteoroid orbits (e.g., Jenniskens, 2006; Campbell-Brown and Jones, 2006). That has changed dramatically as a result of the new video-based and radar-based orbit surveys.

When I plotted up the 820,000 video-generated orbits from the main video surveys in sun-centered ecliptic coordinates, in 5° intervals of solar longitude (e.g., Fig. 3), the resulting movie

Results: Meteor shower outbursts

The meteoroid orbit surveys also detect meteor outbursts. In contrast to the evolved streams, these are meteor showers, or shower components, from streams so little evolved (and spatially or temporally confined) that they do not return annually. They often represent dust released only one or a few orbits back in time, or are due to older dust trapped in mean-motion resonances. Some meteor outbursts can be predicted. Many such predictions are listed in Jenniskens (2006). Recent predictions were

Discussion of meteoroid stream dynamics

Answers to some of the fundamental questions that were posed in the beginning of this review were obtained from a systematic analysis of CMOR and CAMS data. By searching for meteoroid streams in the orbit of known dormant comets, Ye et al., 2016a, Ye et al., 2016b) determined that 2.0+/−1.7% of the near Earth Object population is composed of dormant comets that in recent years created a detectable meteoroid stream. This suggests that the dormancy rate among active comets is at least 10⁻⁵ per

Showers on other planets

The close encounter of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) to Mars on October 19, 2014 (Vaubaillon et al., 2014; Ye et al., 2014; Ye and Hui, 2014; Moorhead et al., 2014) resulted in the detection of a metal atom layer high in the Martian atmosphere causing strong airglow in the metal ion line of Mg+(Schneider et al., 2015). The airglow emission was detected in part because such glow is absent in the upper atmosphere of Mars in normal years. Sadly, efforts to image meteor showers directly from

Conclusions and future work

Much work is ahead to explain the observed features of meteoroid streams. The status of meteoroid stream modeling is still in its infancy. Many models fail to explain even the most basic features of the observed meteor showers. Dynamical models of the zodiacal cloud also still need to address fundamental issues, such as the short semi-major axis of radar-detected apex-source meteors and the nature of the toroidal complex.

The future for data collection and monitoring of meteor showers is looking

Acknowledgments

I thank the referees for their constructive comments. I am also grateful for the large international team of observers that over the years have build and operated the CAMS camera network to provide the data presented here. This work is supported by the NASA NEOO Program (NNX14-AR92G).

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A search for new parent bodies is, due to the continuous massive increase in reporting new meteor showers (Jenniskens et al., 2020), highly desirable and is being performed by many authors using various models, e.g. (Abedin et al., 2015, 2017, 2018; Babadzhanov et al., 2015a, b; Babadzhanov et al., 2017; Egal et al., 2019; Ishiguro et al., 2015; Jopek and Williams, 2013; Babadzhanov et al., 2017; Kornoš et al., 2015; Kováčová et al., 2020; Matlovič et al., 2020; Lyytinen and Jenniskens, 2003; Rudawska and Vaubaillon, 2015; Rudawska et al., 2016; Šegon et al., 2014a, b, 2017). Review articles on meteor showers were published by Jenniskens (2006, 2017), and a review chapter by Vaubaillon et al. (2019) on modeling the meteoroid streams and search for their parent bodies was, recently, published in the book “Meteoroids: Sources of Meteors on Earth and Beyond” (Ryabova et al., 2019). In this paper, we present our stream modeling of another two periodic comets, which has not yet been examined for these purposes: C/1894 G1 (Gale) and C/1936 O1 (Kaho-Kozik-Lis).
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Meteor showers in review

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Methods: the meteor shower sky at different meteoroid sizes

Results: the newly identified wandering showers

Results: Meteor shower outbursts

Discussion of meteoroid stream dynamics

Showers on other planets

Conclusions and future work

Acknowledgments

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