Freaks - Home trieucontim.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from trieucontim.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Meteors from rare long-period comets
Posted by
May 27, 2021
Long-period comets may take thousands of years to orbit our sun once. This artist’s concept shows the meteoroid stream from long-period Comet Thatcher entering the solar system and looping around the sun. The outer blue ellipse is the orbit of Neptune. Comet Thatcher is responsible for April’s Lyrid meteor shower. Image via P. Jenniskens/ SETI Institute.
Around the world, a network of low-light video security cameras are pointed at dark skies, capturing faint meteors and using triangulation to determine their trajectories and orbits. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute leads this project, which is called CAMS. He said in May 2021 that he’s using the data to discover that some long-period comets, with orbits up to 4,000 years long, are the sources of some of the meteors captured by CAMS. The passes of these comets might sometimes create a meteor rain, he said, plus the potential for an impact by a comet. He said: