Meteor outbursts from long-period comet dust trails

Abstract

Long-period comets have narrow 1-revolution old dust trails that can cause meteor outbursts when encountered by Earth. To facilitate observing campaigns that will characterise and perhaps help find Earth threatening long-period comets from their trace of meteoric debris, we use past accounts of outbursts from 14 different showers to calculate the future dust trail positions near Earth orbit. We also examine known near-Earth long-period comets and identify six potential new showers, which can be utilised to learn more about these objects. We demonstrate that it is the 1-revolution trail that is responsible for meteor outbursts. A method is presented that calculates in what year these showers are likely to return and at what hour. The calculations improve on earlier approximate methods that used the Sun's reflex motion to gauge the trail motion relative to Earth's orbit.

A cometary origin for martian atmospheric methane

“…The melted mass disregarded in Flynn (1996) amounts to 29.1 % of the total IDP carbon delivered to Mars annually, constituting significant additional methane from infall sources. The portion of particles experiencing greater than 50 % melting is composed of particles greater than 10 -4 g in mass (Flynn, 1996), and this larger mass fraction is important because lunar impact monitoring programs indicate that meteor streams contain a higher flux of large (>30 g) meteoroids than the IDP population (Oberst and Nakamura, 1991;Lyytinen and Jenniskens, 2003;Suggs et al, 2014), which is dominated by particles of 10 -6 -10 -4…”

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“…However, the calculated trails are always just inside Earth orbit, as first noticed by Lyytinen and Jenniskens [2003]. This discrepancy is thought to be due to ejection conditions being slightly different from those in the Crifo model.…”

“…The three most recent returns of comet Kiess to the inner solar system occurred in 1911, 83 B.C., and about 2000 years prior. The oldest dust trail has now been perturbed beyond recognition [Lyytinen and Jenniskens, 2003], while the dust from 1911 still surrounds the comet as a cloud of dust. The 83 B.C.…”

Do comets have chondrules and CAIs? Evidence from the Leonid meteors

“…However, the exact positions of the orbits mean that some sets of storms are better than others, and recent storms have been extremely good, well-predicted, and hence, well-studied (Jenniskens and Butow 1999;Jenniskens et al 1998). Other long-period comets can produce similar storms, and recent improvements in prediction of the storms (Lyytinen and Jenniskens 2003) may make it possible to observe many more meteors from known comets in the future, but at the moment, the Leonids provide by far the best data set.…”