The prediction of meteor showers from all potential parent comets

TL;DR

This study models the dynamical evolution of potential meteor shower streams from known periodic comets to predict new showers and understand their relationships, using orbital comparisons with observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive modeling approach to link meteor showers with their parent comets and explores the diversity and symmetry of meteor shower radiants.

Findings

Multiple meteor showers linked to over ten parent comets.

Symmetry observed in radiant areas with respect to Earth's apex.

Identification of diverse structures in meteor shower complexes.

Abstract

The objectives of this project are to predict new meteor showers associated with as many as possible known periodic comets and to find a generic relationship of some already known showers with these comets. For a potential parent comet, we model a theoretical stream at the moment of its perihelion passage in a far past, and follow its dynamical evolution until the present. Subsequently, we analyze the orbital characteristics of the parts of the stream that approach the Earth's orbit. Modelled orbits of the stream particles are compared with the orbits of actual photographic, video, and radar meteors from several catalogues. The whole procedure is repeated for several past perihelion passages of the parent comet. To keep our description compact but detailed, we usually present only either a single or a few parent comets with their associated showers in one paper. Here, an overview of the results from the modelling of the meteor-shower complexes of more than ten parent bodies will be presented. This enables their diversities to be shown. Some parent bodies may associate meteor showers which exhibit a symmetry of their radiant areas with respect to the ecliptic (ecliptical, toroidal, or showers of an ecliptic-toroidal structure), and there are showers which have no counterpart with a similar ecliptical longitude on the opposite hemisphere. However, symmetry of the radiant areas of the pair filaments with respect to the Earth's apex is visible in almost all the complexes which we examined.