Luminosity Function of Faint Sporadic Meteors measured with a Wide-Field CMOS mosaic camera Tomo-e PM

Abstract

Imaging observations of faint meteors were carried out on April 11 and 14, 2016 with a wide-field CMOS mosaic camera, Tomo-e PM, mounted on the 105-cm Schmidt telescope at Kiso Observatory, the University of Tokyo. Tomo-e PM, which is a prototype model of Tomo-e Gozen, can monitor a sky of $\sim 1.98\mathrm{de}{\mathrm{g}}^2$ at 2\,Hz. The numbers of detected meteors are 1514 and 706 on April 11 and 14, respectively. The detected meteors are attributed to sporadic meteors. Their absolute magnitudes range from $+4$ to $+10\mathrm{mag}$ in the $V$-band, corresponding to about $8.3\times 10^{-2}$ to $3.3\times 10^{-4}\mathrm{g}$ in mass. The present magnitude distributions we obtained are well explained by a single power-law luminosity function with a slope parameter $r=3.1\pm 0.4$ and a meteor rate ${\log }_{10}{N}_0=-5.5\pm 0.5$. The results demonstrate a high performance of telescopic observations with a wide-field video camera to constrain the luminosity function of faint meteors. The performance of Tomo-e Gozen is about two times higher than that of Tomo-e PM. A survey with Tomo-e Gozen will provide a more robust measurement of the luminosity function.

18 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Planetary and Space Science