Global Electrophonic Fireball Survey: a review of witness reports - I

TL;DR

This paper reviews witness reports of electrophonic sounds from meteors, revealing new insights into their brightness and duration, and challenges existing theories by suggesting corona discharge as a possible mechanism.

Contribution

It presents the first systematic survey of witness reports on electrophonic meteors, highlighting biases and proposing a revived corona discharge hypothesis.

Findings

Electrophonic sounds are associated with meteors brighter than -2 magnitude.

Sustained sounds can occur from lower brightness meteors, contrary to previous beliefs.

Existing theories do not fully explain the observed phenomena.

Abstract

Despite more than 300 years since its first scientific description, the phenomenon of electrophonic sounds from meteors are still eluding complete physical explanation. According to the accepted knowledge, the sound itself is created by strong electric fields on the ground induced by the meteor. Nonetheless, there is no convincing theory that can fully explain how a meteor can generate such a strong electric field. Extreme rareness of the phenomenon has prevented a substantial experimental work so far; thus, consequently, it remains on the margins of scientific interest. This is quite unfortunate since these electric fields suggest existence of a highly complex electromagnetic coupling and charge dynamics between the meteors and the ionosphere. Therefore, the existing theoretical work relies mostly on the witness reports. The Global Electrophonic Fireball Survey (GEFS) is the first systematic survey of witness reports of these sounds with a standardized questionnaire designed exclusively for this phenomenon. Here we present the overall picture of the phenomenon that emerged after almost 100 reports collected by GEFS. It becomes clear now that the lover meteor brightness limit is about -2$^m$, suggesting a bias in the existing electrophonic sounds catalogues toward brighter meteors. In contrast to the current belief that such low brightness electrophonic meteors produce transient sounds, we find that they can also produce sustained sounds. The current theories can not accommodate these results. We revive the old idea that the electrophonic sounds can be created by the corona discharge mechanism, in addition to the existing prevalent suggestion of resonant vibration of objects on the ground.