Matching Meteor Showers and Parents: A New Approach

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Meteoroid streams are debris trails left behind by small solar system bodies, and most of these parents should still reside in the current NEO and comet population. We currently know at least 7000 of these objects, some of them probably related with already known meteoroid streams.
The usual approach to establish these associations has been to compare the orbit of a stream with that of each possible parent, trying to identify closely matching pairs and then investigating them dynamically to prove the connection.
Unfortunately, in most cases, the correct matching between the parent and the stream is made difficult by the fact that the orbit of the latter is poorly known (especially for weak showers), since it has been computed only from a very limited set of meteoric events.
In this work, we address the problem in a different way: instead of computing an orbit for the stream, and comparing it with the well known orbit of each possible parent, we calculate the theoretical radiant, longitude and velocity associated with each parent, and then compare them with those directly measured on the streams. Since the latter set of parameters is more directly measured on a shower, we can eliminate a significant part of uncertainty in the identification that comes from a poorly constrained meteoroid orbit.
We tested this method on the current list of known NEOs and the IAU MDC list of established and proposed meteor showers: we produced a new list of possible associations, ranked in terms of statistical significance, which includes most of the already accepted NEO-shower associations, plus a significant number of new ones.
In some cases, we also obtained astrometric observations on some of these newly proposed parents, to better constrain their orbits and allow a meaningful dynamical analysis that can prove the association.

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