The orbits of already known comets and asteroids are often monitored in space to establish their possible “kinship” with this or that “star shower”. Now scientists realized that it is possible to act in the opposite direction: to study the meteor shower and determine which celestial body it is directed to.

A meteor shower is a “rain” of debris from comets and asteroids. As they get closer to the Sun, they begin to lose material due to heating, and this is not limited to the comet’s spectacular tail. Ejected tail material fills the “track” behind the comet and remains there. Thus, a scattered cloud of fine debris extends across the entire circumsolar region of the orbit of a comet or asteroid.

The Earth’s orbit intersects the orbits of a sufficient number of comets and asteroids. This means that each year it passes through various plumes left by small objects. When this happens, the planet attracts all these small rocks and we observe them as meteors.

So it’s clear why every meteor shower occurs at exactly the same time of year. Depending on the location of the plume relative to the Earth, “stars” enter it in such a way that they appear to “fall” from a certain place in the sky. This place is called bright. For this reason, meteor showers are named after the constellations they belong to. Let’s say Orionid time comes in October-November. It is not difficult to guess which constellation they should look at. These are also fragments of the famous Comet Halley, which visited us in 1986 and will return only in 2061.

In total, astronomers have so far discovered 17 comets and asteroids “associated” with certain meteor showers. By the way, the same celestial body can be the cause of two different shooting stars because the Earth passes through its plume twice. The same comet Halley gives rise to May Eta-Aquarids, except Orionid.

The problem is that more than 500 meteor streams are known, meaning that the “parents” of most of them cannot be determined. Almost all of the dozen and a half established are short-period comets that we know well and observe every few dozen years. But the biggest problem with long-period comets is that they can occur every few thousand years. This is probably why many of them were not discovered by humanity during its existence and were not suspected of them.

With such a schedule, no one can guarantee that the path of a comet flying in our direction will not lead directly to its fall on Earth. It is worth noting that comets smaller than a kilometer in size are extremely rare, so these blocks are important. According to rough calculations, if such an average object falls, an explosion with a capacity of 750 thousand megatons equivalent to TNT will occur.

Therefore, recently, a team of astronomers from the USA, for the sake of the peace of all humanity, aimed to deal with the “family tree” of meteor streams whose “parents” have not yet been found. In an article available on the preprint server arXiv.orgScientists said that this is quite possible.

Researchers decided to “pretend” to not know the 17 already found “culprits” of meteor showers and tried to calculate them solely based on the properties of shooting stars. The characteristics of each meteor shower formed a picture of the comet or asteroid cloud from which it originated. The “arc” of this cloud ultimately allows us to define the exact ellipse of the celestial body’s orbit and even determine its sample position in this orbit, as astronomers explain. It turned out that in all 17 cases the calculations were completely correct, that is, it was possible to identify their “masters” from meteor streams.

Moreover, this method made it possible to confirm the origin of another meteor shower, Sigma Hydride. It occurs from November 22 to January 4 and is observed in the constellation Hydra. There were suspicions that these were fragments of the recently discovered comet Nishimura C/2023 P1. By the way, for a long time, next time it will fly at 24:30.

It turns out that the Sigma Hydrides’ “tracks” actually lead to him. It is interesting that this comet was noticed by a Japanese amateur astronomer in 2023, less than a month before it reached perihelion (the point of the orbit closest to the Sun), that is, almost on the eve of its arrival. It was possible to calculate this eight months in advance, based on the meteor shower.