Each winter, Geminid meteors light up the sky as they pass near Earth, creating one of the most powerful meteor showers in the night sky. Now, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission provides new evidence that a violent, catastrophic event created Geminids.

Most meteor showers come from comets made up of ice and dust. As the comet approaches the Sun, the ice evaporates and releases gas, displacing small pieces of the comet, creating a trail of dust. This iterative process slowly fills the comet’s orbit with material that creates meteor showers as Earth passes through the current.

However, the Gemini runoff appears to originate from an asteroid (a piece of rock and metal) named 3200 Phaethon. Asteroids like Phaethon are generally not affected by solar heat like comets, leading scientists to wonder what causes the Phaethon current to form in the night sky.

“What’s really weird is that we know that Phaethon is an asteroid, but when it passes near the Sun, it seems to have some thermal activity. Princeton University researcher and co-author Jamie Saley of a research paper recently published in the Planetary Science Journal said most asteroids no.

The work builds on previous work by Salai and several colleagues from the Parker Solar Probe mission to paint a picture of the structure and behavior of a large dust cloud swirling inside the Solar System. Taking advantage of Parker’s flight path—an orbit only millions of miles away from the Sun, closer than any spacecraft in history—scientists were able to get the best direct glimpses of dust particles ejected from past comets and asteroids.

Built and operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the Parker Solar Probe does not have a dedicated dust counter to provide accurate measurements of grain mass, composition, velocity and direction. However, dust particles hurl the spacecraft along its path and high-speed impacts create unique electrical signals or clouds of plasma. These shock clouds generate unique electrical signals that are picked up by several sensors in the probe’s FIELDS instrument, which measures the electric and magnetic fields near the Sun.

To gain insight into the origin of the Gemini current, the scientists used Parker’s data to model three possible formation scenarios and then compared these models with existing models based on ground-based observations. They found that the patterns of violence most closely matched Parker’s data. This means that a possible sudden, powerful event, such as a high-speed collision with another object or a gas explosion, among other possibilities, created the Geminid flow. Source