Astronomers solve the mystery of the king of meteor showers
The Gemini meteor shower begins in mid-December each year, and is often also referred to as the Gemini meteor, or the king of the meteor shower.
Mysteries surrounding the origin of this meteor shower have long puzzled scientists because while most meteor showers originate when a comet produces a tail of ice and dust, Gemini meteors originate from an asteroid, which are chunks of rock and mineral that don't usually produce a tail.
The Gemini meteors come from the constellation of the Gemini (named after the constellation) between the constellations Taurus and Cancer. It is known that these meteor showers originate from an Apollo asteroid (Near-Earth Asteroid Group (NEA)), which is Phaethon (3200 Phaethon), which for some inexplicable reason is influenced by the Sun and leaves a stream across the night sky.
Until recently, Gemini meteors were only studied from Earth. Now, Princeton University scientists have used observations from NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission to better examine the king of the meteor shower. The team concluded that it is likely that the Geminids meteor shower started in a violent and catastrophic event, and that could be a high-speed collision with another object in space, for example, or a gas explosion.
The results of this study were published in The Planetary Science Journal, which narrowed down hypotheses about the formation and history of this asteroid that would explain its unconventional behavior.
"What's really strange is that we know Phaethon is an asteroid, but because it flies so close to the Sun, it seems to have some sort of temperature-driven activity," said Jami Szalay, a researcher at Princeton University's Space Physics Laboratory and a co-author on the paper. Most asteroids don't do it.”
Some scientists previously suggested that Phaethon might indeed be a comet, and that it had lost its ice to leave behind just a rocky, asteroid-like core. But the new study shows that the origins of the meteor shower are much more dramatic than that.
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