Enhanced activity of the Southern Taurids in 2005 and 2015
Abstract
The paper presents an analysis of Polish Fireball Network (PFN) observations of enhanced activity of the Southern Taurid meteor shower in 2005 and 2015. In 2005, between October 20 and November 10, seven stations of PFN determined 107 accurate orbits with 37 of them belonging to the Southern Taurid shower. In the same period of 2015, 25 stations of PFN recorded 719 accurate orbits with 215 orbits of the Southern Taurids. Both maxima were rich in fireballs which accounted to 17% of all observed Taurids. The whole sample of Taurid fireballs is quite uniform in the sense of starting and terminal heights of the trajectory. On the other hand a clear decreasing trend in geocentric velocity with increasing solar longitude was observed. Orbital parameters of observed Southern Taurids were compared to orbital elements of Near Earth Objects (NEO) from the NEODYS-2 database. Using the Drummond criterion with threshold as low as 0.06, we found over 100 fireballs strikingly similar to the orbit of asteroid 2015 TX24. Several dozens of Southern Taurids have orbits similar to three other asteroids, namely: 2005 TF50, 2005 UR and 2010 TU149. All mentioned NEOs have orbital periods very close to the 7:2 resonance with Jupiter's orbit. It confirms a theory of a "resonant meteoroid swarm" within the Taurid complex that predicts that in specific years, the Earth is hit by a greater number of meteoroids capable of producing fireballs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1701.08990,
title = {Enhanced activity of the Southern Taurids in 2005 and 2015},
author = {A. Olech and P. Żołądek and M. Wiśniewski and Z. Tymiński and M. Stolarz and M. Bęben and D. Dorosz and T. Fajfer and K. Fietkiewicz and M. Gawroński and M. Gozdalski and M. Kałużny and M. Krasnowski and H. Krygiel and T. Krzyżanowski and M. Kwinta and T. Łojek and M. Maciejewski and S. Miernicki and M. Myszkiewicz and P. Nowak and K. Polak and K. Polakowski and J. Laskowski and M. Szlagor and G. Tissler and T. Suchodolski and W. Węgrzyk and P. Woźniak and P. Zaręba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.08990},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
13 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS