A long - standing closed book of planetary astronomy appears to have been solve . An unusual meteor shower that was respect once over 60 years ago and did n’t occur again until recently may have been due to a spend comet .
The thrilling tale begins in December 1956 , when Nipponese researchers watch over for the first time a meteor exhibitioner they had n’t seen before . They called it Phoenicid , as it appear to originate from the constellation of the Phoenix . However , when people take care for it the following year , it was n’t there .
The conundrum of the Phoenicid was born . scientist had to seek to answer two query : What get the shooting star lavish ? And why did it only happen once ? Two Japanese teams were able to find a resolution to both question .
Meteor showers are stimulate by the debris left over by comets crossing the orbit of our major planet . establish on its domain , a likely effort for the Phoenicid was Comet Blanpain . This comet appear in 1819 and then disappeared . However , what interested the researchers was n’t just the similar disappearing act . In 2003 , an asteroid was chance upon in the same ambit as Comet Blanpain . The team purpose that if this object was the leftover of the comet , it could be responsible for the meteor shower .
This conjecture came with a prediction : The shower would reoccur again on December 1 , 2014 . The two team last out to look for the meteors , with one team head to North Carolina and the other going to Las Palmas , one of the Canary island . They indeed see Phoenicid meteor that night – 29 out of 138 bolide to be accurate .
These observations powerfully suggest that Comet Blanpain was to blame , and while mostly inactive , it must have released enough dust debris in the 20th century to make the 1956 shower . The teams not only solved the mystery , but they also estimated historical change in a comet for the first meter .
“ We would like to utilize this technique to many other meteor showers for which the parent bodies are presently without exonerated cometic activity , in order of magnitude to investigate the evolution of small-scale body in the Solar System , ” team drawing card Yasunori Fujiwara , a alum student at the Department of Polar Science , SOKENDAI , say in astatement .
The newspaper from Fujiwara ’s research will be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan , and the other team ’s work will soon be available in the journal Planetary and Space Science .
