meteor hunter

An astronomer describes his search for meteor meteors and hopes that we too will join in the celebration

Meteors are like windows that allow us to look into our past as well as our future. A meteor shower occurs when a stream of rocky material hits the Earth's atmosphere and we see many "shooting stars". The grains of sand and the small stones of the meteor shower trace a kind of trail in the sky leading to the body from which they came: usually a comet, which is a glacial remnant from the days of our solar system's formation. The meteor shower indicates the existence of comets that have not yet been discovered and may one day collide with the Earth.

Only recently did these new comets begin to be discovered in surveys of celestial bodies close to Earth. From time to time they break, and this is how many of the meteor showers we see in the sky are created.

To map these meteor showers, we scan the night sky. We operate 60 security cameras spread over three areas, Lick Observatory, Fremont Peak Observatory, and Sunnyvale, all near San Francisco Bay. Instead of looking for criminals, we look for meteors. The trajectory and speed of any meteor flying through the atmosphere can be calculated using triangulation if it is observed from two or three observation points. In 2011, we performed 47,000 such measurements. A meteor is a group of meteors coming from one direction. We have already come across meters that came from a location that was unknown to us before.

One of them, for example, was a bright fireball that penetrated the atmosphere at such a depth that remnants of it remained. Such space rocks that arrived before the earth are called meteorites.

My most exciting meteor hunter was in 2008. This was the first time an asteroid had been detected in space moving straight towards us (an asteroid is a mass similar to a comet, except that it has already lost its ice and some or all of its carbon compounds. Asteroids are less likely to disintegrate.) This mass was about four meters in diameter. It entered the atmosphere over Sudan and disintegrated. Most of them were eroded to dust, but some larger fragments also remained. We went out with students from the University of Khartoum to look for the fragments, and in the end we found about 600 meteorites. To our surprise it was a mixed package of at least 10 types of meteors. This asteroid was a whole world.

If you want to participate in our tracking of meteor meteors, you can use the camera connected to the computer. You just have to find a friend who lives 50 to 150 kilometers away from you, to enable triangulation of the trails. You can reach the online project HERE. There are meteors every night, and every night can have surprises, so keep your eyes open.

– From a conversation with Marisa Fessenden