Parent comets of meteoroid streams

Abstract

IntroductionAlmost 1000 meteor showers are known at present. But it is possible to connect the related meteoroid stream to a possible parent body only for a small fraction of them. The so-called D-criteria of the orbital similarity (or dissimilarity) enable us to reveal a possible connection through the similarity of orbits of the comet and such stream particles, which orbits have not been drastically altered by dynamical evolution. By using D-criteria we evaluate the similarity of such orbits to confirm and complete the list of possible parent comets to already known meteoroid streams.Meteor shower dataThe parameters of meteor showers are archived in the Shower Databasea (SD) of the Meteor Data Center (MDC) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is currently undergoing a series of verifications and improvements [1, 2, 3]. One of them is the update of the information about suggested parent bodies of individual meteor showers, as it is incomplete due to various reasons. At the moment, only about 16% of meteor showers in IAU MDC SD has some kind of such information available. For this work, we used 1304 recorded meteor shower solutions downloaded from the IAU MDC SD, which represent 854 meteor showers.Cometary dataWe comprised a file with cometary orbits from three catalogues: the 17th edition of Catalogue of Cometary Orbits [4], orbits from the IAU Minor Planet Centerb and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cometary cataloguec. In some cases, the changes of orbital elements are significant, osculating orbits of the same comet calculated for different epochs from all three catalogues were preserved. After omitting the orbits with perihelion values greater than 1.2 au (which orbits cannot be linked with known meteoroid streams via orbital similarity), we compiled a list of 2865 cometary orbits.Confirmed and newly identified associationsFor evaluation of the orbital similarity, we used Dsh [5], Dd [6] and the hybrid Dh [7] functions. The threshold values for all three criteria were identified by using a set of artificial meteoroid orbits with characteristics modeled after the observed orbits and assessing the probability of a random coincidence between each modeled orbit with the orbit of the considered comet.By application of the above-mentioned criteria, we obtained the following lists with shower-comet associations: 1) shower-comet pairs proposed in the past by various authors which were confirmed by our search, 2)  new shower-comet pairs that have not been (to our knowledge) proposed previously and 3) shower-comet pairs that have been previously proposed by various authors but our search could not identify them. Several cases are discussed individually. These include the new discoveries, cases of a single comet being associated with more than one meteor shower, one meteor shower being associated with more than a single comet and some specific cases of multi-solution showers for which not all of the solutions provided consistent results.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Slovak Grant Agency for Science (VEGA), grant No. 2/0009/22. This research also made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services, data files from the IAU Minor Planet Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory tools.