2023-06-16 12:45:25
The Geminids light up the sky as they pass Earth each December, producing one of the most intense meteor showers in the night sky.
The mysteries surrounding the origin of this meteor cloud have long intrigued experts because, while most meteor clouds that generate shooting star showers are created from the emitted trail of ice and dust particles by a comet, the Geminids come from an asteroid, a rocky body that normally does not produce a tail. The asteroid in question is Phaethon (Phaethon), number 3200 in the official asteroid catalogue.
As a comet approaches the Sun, it heats up and its ice-rich surface emits a tail of gas that, in turn, carries small bits of ice and dust with it. This material will continue to trail behind the comet as long as it remains within range of the Sun’s gravitational pull. Over time, this repeated process fills the orbit of the parent body with material to form a meteoroid cloud.
But since asteroids like Phaethon are made of rock and metal, they are not usually affected by the Sun’s heat like comets. So what caused the Phaethon meteor cloud to form?
In addition, another enigma is that this meteoroid cloud follows a slightly different orbit from that of Phaethon, especially when it is closer to the Sun.
Photograph of a shooting star shower from the Geminids. Several luminous trails left by as many shooting stars can be seen. (Photo: NASA/Lauren Harnett)
Until recently, the Geminids had only been studied from Earth. Now, Wolf Cukier and Jamey Szalay of Princeton University in the United States have used observations made by NASA’s Parker space probe to further investigate the mysterious origin of the Geminids.
Some scholars suggested that Phaethon might actually be a comet that lost its entire supply of snow and ice, leaving only a rocky, asteroid-like core. However, the new observations made by Parker show that, although some of Phaethon’s activity is related to temperature, it is very likely that the creation of the Geminid cloud was not due to a cometary mechanism, but to something much more. more catastrophic…
Analysis of the data has led to an unexpected conclusion: it was probably a violent, cataclysmic event (such as a high-speed collision with another body) that created the Geminids. Such an origin fits well with the anomalous behavior of the Geminids.
The study is titled “Formation, Structure, and Detectability of the Geminids Meteoroid Stream”. And it has been published in the academic journal Planetary Science. (Fountain: NCYT de Amazings)
#reveal #mysterious #origin #shower #shooting #stars