A ton of material was added to the Earth in one meteorite meter

The 2011 Draconide shower was particularly rich in organic matter left by Comet Giacobini-Ziner

About a ton of material originating from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner was added to the Earth's atmosphere on October 8 and 9, 2011 during one of the most massive meteor showers of the last decade, in which over 400 meteors were observed per hour. On the science website we reported on The expected rain, of which only remnants were seen in Israel.

Every 6.6 years Comet Giacobini-Ziner arrives in the inner solar system and is at the perihelion - the closest point to the sun in its orbit. At this point, the comet evaporates the ice and emits a large number of particles that are spread along its path in the form of streaks. The veterans in these particles have already created a cloud that the Earth crosses every year at the beginning of October. The result of the transition is a meteor shower known as the Dragonids. Meteors from this comet come from a region of the sky belonging to the northern "Dragon" system and hit the atmosphere at a speed of 75 thousand km/h, a relatively low speed for other meteors.

Jose Maria Trigo, a researcher at the CSIS Institute for Space Sciences says: "When a comet comes close to the Sun, it vaporizes parts of the ice on its surface and the gas pressure drives a large number of particles that enter orbit around the year and form clouds. The study showed that on the evening between October 8 and 9 2011, Earth crossed three dense clumps of particles left when the comet passed through Earth's orbit at its closest point of The path of the comet to the sun."

The researchers, whose research was published in the Monthly Notices of the British Royal Astronomical Society, managed to reconstruct the trajectory of 20 meteors. Thus they confirmed that the origin of the particles is in this periodic comet (a periodic comet is a comet with a fixed orbit around the sun, in contrast, there are many comets that come from the edge of the solar system and do not return with a fixed frequency AB). They used data from 25 video recording stations operated by the Spanish Meteor and Firewall Network (SPMN), in collaboration with amateur astronomers.

Two of those meteoroid streaks, whose existence the theory predicted, were identified by scientists as materials left by the comet in 1874, 1894 and 1900. Nevertheless, the researchers confirmed that there are other compressed regions that the Earth has passed through that were not predicted and they present a new challenge to the theoretical models.

In a second paper, researchers analyzed the chemical composition of six fireballs - extremely bright meteors formed from large clumps of material in the same eruption of the comet. Jose María Madalido, a researcher from the University of Huelva and the coordinator of the second study adds: "One of the fireballs, whose initial mass was 6 km and a diameter of about half a meter, was named Lavaria in honor of the city where it was observed when it reached a brightness similar to that of the moon that night."

The six fireballs analyzed had a composition similar to that of carbonaceous meteorites (the carbonaceous) chondrites) which are rich in organic materials, but they were much more fragile. Trigo concludes: "They do not appear to have undergone chemical change during their short stay in the open space environment, which is interesting in itself and confirms the astrobiological role of these particles for the continuous transfer of water and organic matter to Earth."

to the notice of the researchers