An eagle-eyed astronomer has discovered that an elusive asteroid is apparently shedding hundreds of fragments — and our planet is flying through the ensuing debris field, making for a spectacular show of shooting stars when these small bits of cosmic metal and rock hit Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA postdoctoral fellow Patrick Shober published his findings in a paper last month in The Astrophysical Journal, which came about from analyzing reams of data from observatories in California, Canada, Japan, and Europe.
As Shober wrote in an essay about his research for The Conversation, he’s working to better understand asteroids, particularly ones that are too small and elusive to detect using typical telescopes — and how they cause meteors, which are bits of rock or dust that heat and light up when they strike our planet’s atmosphere.
Many meteors originate from comets, breaking off as these celestial bodies approach the Sun, heating up and sprouting tails of dust and gas; this debris can fall into our atmosphere, manifesting as brilliant shooting stars.
Asteroids also shed debris and cause meteors — like the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which measures at 3.6 miles in diameter and is the source of the awe-inspiring annual Geminids meteor shower that occurs in December.
However, these objects are large enough to be easily found with a telescope, and Shober wanted to find clues about smaller asteroids that can’t be picked up with available instruments. He examined a sample of 235,271 meteors and fireballs, and used computational tools to see if the samples contained any meteors that seem to group together or had similar characteristics, suggesting they came from the same source.
From this work, he found the cluster of 282 meteors that must be coming from a small asteroid that’s breaking up as it approaches the Sun — a cosmic junkyard that our planet now seems to be journeying through.
“Each meteor shower we observe occurs when Earth passes through one of these debris streams,” he wrote in The Conversation. “So if astronomers can detect meteor showers, they can also be used to find active objects in space.”
More on asteroids: Asteroid Behaving Strangely
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