Mapping Meteoroid Orbits Meteor Showers （映射流星体的轨道流星雨）.pdfVIP

Mapping Meteoroid Orbits Meteor Showers Discovered JUAN CARLOS CASADO 20 September 2012 sky telescope As Earth circles the Sun, it crosses a rich and changing tangle of meteoroid streams. Automated cameras are mapping them better than ever. PETER JENNISKENS FOR THE FIRST TIME in nearly two centuries of sur- searches for near-Earth objects have been identifying the veying the night sky, astronomers are charting meteor parent bodies of numerous showers for the first time. showers in a massive and objective way — by automated Over many millennia, a meteoroid stream gradually surveillance video. Generations of naked-eye observers spreads out and falls apart, creating the great background have discovered and monitored meteor showers by visual of random sporadic meteoroids that impact spacecraft counting and hand-plotting. Photography and radar have unpredictably and give rise to the solar system’s vast helped, but all these methods have their limits. Now we’re zodiacal dust cloud. using networks of low-light video cameras and sophisti- cated data processing to map meteoroid streams much Mapping the Meteor Year better than ever before. We’re finding dozens of new To my surprise, the first week of December has turned minor showers and some surprising not-so-minor ones. out to be the most interesting for meteor observations. Amateurs are participating, and we’re seeking more help The new CAMS data show that at least 14 significant in this ongoing effort. showers are active that week, each with its own particular Until now, astronomers have agreed on only a short list radiant direction on the sky, velocity, durat