Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999dda....31.0203h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #31, #02.03
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Frank and Sigwarth [e.g. Rev. Geophys. 31, 1 (1993), J. Geophys. Res. 104, 115 (1999)] have for many years promoted the hypothesis of a population of small ``house-sized'' comets in near-parabolic orbits nearly tangent with the Earth's, raining down on the Earth at a rate of ~ 20/minute, based on ``holes'' in the dayglow of the Earth's atmosphere, observed first by the Dynamics Explorer 1 satellite, and more recently by the Polar satellite. One of the key aspects of the claimed observations is that the atmospheric holes appear to be more numerous on the morning hemisphere of the Earth, to which Frank and Sigwarth draw analogy to radar meteors, which show a similar asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the distribution of orbits posited by Frank and Sigwarth yield the opposite asymmetry from the claimed observations. The only class of orbits which yield the correct diurnal asymmetry, and preserve acceptably low entry speeds, are orbits interior to the Earth's, with perihelia near the orbit of Mercury. Icy bodies in such orbits would indeed be ``snowballs from hell.''
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