A reference meteor magnitude for intercomparable fluxes

Abstract

The rate at which meteors pass through Earth's atmosphere has been measured or estimated many times over; existing flux measurements span at least 12 astronomical magnitudes, or roughly five decades in mass. Unfortunately, the common practice of scaling flux to a universal reference magnitude of +6.5 tends to collapse the magnitude or mass dimension. Furthermore, results from different observation networks can appear discrepant due solely to the use of different assumed population indices, and readers cannot resolve this discrepancy without access to magnitude data. We present an alternate choice of reference magnitude that is representative of the observed meteors and minimizes the dependence of flux on population index. We apply this choice to measurements of recent Orionid meteor shower fluxes to illustrate its usefulness for synthesizing independent flux measurements.

Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (6)

• The Global Meteor Network -- Methodology and First Results
• Computing optical meteor flux using Global Meteor Network data
• Development of a Very Faint Meteor Detection System based on an EMCCD Sensor and Matched Filter Processing
• Coordinated Optical and Radar Measurements of Low Velocity Meteors
• Measuring Fluxes of Meteor Showers with the NASA All-Sky Fireball Network
• Iron Rain: measuring the occurrence rate and origin of small iron meteoroids at Earth