Not So Fast: A New Catalog of Meteor Persistent Trains

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a nearly two year long campaign to detect and analyze meteor persistent trains (PTs) - self-emitting phenomena which can linger up to an hour after their parent meteor. The modern understanding of PTs has been primarily developed from the Leonid storms at the turn of the century; our goal was to assess the validity of these conclusions using a diverse sample of meteors with a wide range of velocities and magnitudes. To this end, year-round observations were recorded by the Widefield Persistent Train camera, 2nd edition (WiPT2) and were passed through a pipeline to filter out airplanes and flag potential meteors. These were classified by visual inspection based on the presence and duration of trains. Observed meteors were cross-referenced with the Global Meteor Network (GMN) database, which independently detects and calculates meteor parameters, enabling statistical analysis of PT-leaving meteors. There were 4726 meteors codetected by the GMN, with 636 of these leaving trains. Among these were a large population of slow, dim meteors that left PTs; these slower meteors had a greater train production rate relative to their faster counterparts. Unlike prior research, we did not find a clear magnitude cutoff or a strong association with fast meteor showers. Additionally, we note several interesting trends not previously reported, which include PT eligibility being primarily determined by a meteor's terminal height and an apparent dynamical origin dependence that likely reflects physical meteoroid properties.

Accepted for publication in JGR Space Physics

References in corpus (11)

• scikit-image: Image processing in Python
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• Imbalanced-learn: A Python Toolbox to Tackle the Curse of Imbalanced Datasets in Machine Learning
• The Global Meteor Network -- Methodology and First Results
• Estimating trajectories of meteors: an observational Monte Carlo approach -- I. Theory
• Altitudinal dependence of meteor radio afterglows measured via optical counterparts
• Modelling the 2022 τ-Herculid outburst
• Testing the Radiation Pattern of Meteor Radio Afterglow
• Tau-Herculid meteor shower on night 30/31 May, 2022, and properties of the meteoroids
• Broadband Imaging to Study the Spectral Distribution of Meteor Radio Afterglows
• Simultaneous broadband radio and optical emission of meteor trains imaged by LOFAR / AARTFAAC and CAMS