Asteroid Phaethon May Be Losing Sodium As It Heats
Asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the origin of the dust that causes the Geminid meteor shower, may be losing sodium due to solar heating as it orbits.
Has everyone been enjoying the Perseids meteor shower this year? I know there are a lot of sky issues with rain (for people who still get rain) and smoke, but I have seen some great astrophotography images on Twitter. There were also a couple of reports of large outbursts from several monitoring systems, including SETI Institute’s Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance program. The shower is still going despite being past its peak, so please continue to try and do some meteor watching.
What causes a meteor shower? When comets pass through our inner solar system, they are heated up by the Sun, and the closer they get, the more they shed their icy particulates and dust. Those particles all stay in the same orbit as the comet, although they trail behind a bit. And if Earth’s orbit ever crosses the orbit of those particles, they hit our atmosphere and burn up on entry, creating the bright streaks we see during meteor showers. Some will even be slightly bigger pieces that create bright fireballs.
Since we can track these meteors back to their orbits based on how they hit the…
