Radar and Meteors: Controversy over the Origin of Meteors in Postwar Astronomy

Details Radar and Meteors: Controversy over the Origin of Meteors in Postwar Astronomy Radar and Meteors: Controversy over the Origin of Meteors in Postwar Astronomy

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.3303s&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #33.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

After World War II radio physicists and engineers discovered that radar reflections were readily obtained off the ionized trails left by meteors. The group led by Bernard Lovell at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station of Manchester University, England, led the effort to design radar transmitters, receivers, and antenna systems that could better understand these reflections. First, an entire suite of daytime meteor showers was found to accompany the familiar nighttime showers. Next, associating with meteor astronomers such as Fred Whipple, Ernst Öpik, and Cuno Hoffmeister, Lovell found that his radar data could contribute to a longstanding controversy in the field: was there any portion of the meteors whose speeds indicated that they were on hyperbolic orbits and therefore of interstellar origin (i.e., >72 km/s), or did all meteoroids originate within the solar system? By 1953 the Jodrell Bank radar astronomers’ huge samples of echoes and measured speeds of meteors indicated that there were in fact no interstellar interlopers. This settled the question for most workers in the field, although Opik and Hoffmeister did not give in.

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