New Nomenclature Rules for Meteor Showers Adopted

TL;DR

This paper introduces simplified nomenclature rules for meteor showers to improve clarity and consistency in the Meteor Data Center database, following a new two-stage approach approved by the IAU.

Contribution

It proposes a new, simplified two-stage naming procedure for meteor showers, replacing the complex previous rules, and has been officially adopted by the IAU.

Findings

Simplified nomenclature rules adopted by IAU in 2022.

Enhanced clarity and consistency in meteor shower naming.

Streamlined process for new and confirmed meteor showers.

Abstract

The Shower Database (SD) of the Meteor Data Center (MDC) had been operating on the basis of stream-naming rules which were too complex and insufficiently precise for 15 years. With a gradual increase in the number of discovered meteor showers, the procedure for submitting new showers to the database and naming them lead to situations that were inconsistent with the fundamental role of the SD - the disambiguation of stream names in the scientific literature. Our aim is to simplify the meteor shower nomenclature rules. We propose a much simpler set of meteor shower nomenclature rules, based on a two-stage approach, similar to those used in the case of asteroids. The first stage applies to a new shower just after its discovery. The second stage concerns the repeatedly observed shower, the existence of which no longer raises any doubts. Our proposed new procedure was approved by a vote of the commission F1 of the IAU in July 2022.