Minor Meteor Showers and the Sporadic Background
Abstract
Both asteroids and comets can come close to the Earth's orbit. Any dust released from any them will form a meteoroid stream whose orbit may allow the Earth to pass through it. If this takes place, the ablation of the meteoroids in the Earth's atmosphere will be observed as meteors. The various ways in which both showers and the related stream can be identified from these observations are described. In this region, orbital evolution is rapid due to a number of effects, so that orbits will progressively diverge from the original orbit and the showers become weaker, making the identification of the stream and its parent more tenuous. Catalogues of recognized showers and streams are listed together with the updated orbital characteristics of all the streams. Eventually a stream will lose its identity and the meteoroids merge into the sporadic background. Methods for determining whether the sporadic meteors originate from comets or asteroids based on their orbits are discussed. Finally, they merge into the zodiacal dust clouds and the observations of these clouds are discussed together with an overview of their main characteristics.
- Publication:
-
Meteoroids: Sources of Meteors on Earth and Beyond
- Pub Date:
- October 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019msme.book..210W
- Keywords:
-
- meteor databases;
- minor meteor shower;
- orbits: similarity criterion;
- sporadic meteors;
- zodiacal cloud