I have an astronomy question I hope someone here can answer. I’ve been reading news about comet 209P/LINEAR and the possibility of a new significant meteor shower in May, but I don’t quite get why it has never occurred before.
I think I might be realizing something I had not realized before: that the comet debris fields are not like continuous hoops of debris circling the sun (and which we occasionally intersect), but rather they are unevenly distributed and perhaps clump around the comet’s position. Is this right?
In the past, whenever I went out to look for meteors during meteor showers, I was envisioning the debris stream as being like a continuous band around the sun, and the earth’s orbit was momentarily intersecting it. But I guess, at least in many cases, it’s more of a discrete clumpy cloud of debris that is orbiting the sun, and which we pass through?
Is this why we have never seen these forcasted “Camelopardalid” meteors before, because this is the first time our orbit has intersected the debris field?
And does this also mean that the Camelopardalids would not be an annual event, but would only occur every so many years (or centuries), when our orbits sync up again and overlap?
I keep seeing news stories refer to this as the beginning of a “new” meteor shower, which made me think it would be an annual thing, but if I’m right about the rest of this, I’m thinking that’s not what was meant. And similarly, is this why the Leonids seem to jump in number every 33 years, because 33 years is the orbital period of the parent comet?
I hope someone can help me out of my confusion.
I think I might be realizing something I had not realized before: that the comet debris fields are not like continuous hoops of debris circling the sun (and which we occasionally intersect), but rather they are unevenly distributed and perhaps clump around the comet’s position. Is this right?
In the past, whenever I went out to look for meteors during meteor showers, I was envisioning the debris stream as being like a continuous band around the sun, and the earth’s orbit was momentarily intersecting it. But I guess, at least in many cases, it’s more of a discrete clumpy cloud of debris that is orbiting the sun, and which we pass through?
Is this why we have never seen these forcasted “Camelopardalid” meteors before, because this is the first time our orbit has intersected the debris field?
And does this also mean that the Camelopardalids would not be an annual event, but would only occur every so many years (or centuries), when our orbits sync up again and overlap?
I keep seeing news stories refer to this as the beginning of a “new” meteor shower, which made me think it would be an annual thing, but if I’m right about the rest of this, I’m thinking that’s not what was meant. And similarly, is this why the Leonids seem to jump in number every 33 years, because 33 years is the orbital period of the parent comet?
I hope someone can help me out of my confusion.
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1fxB5P8
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire