Roberto Gorelli points our attention at a recently published meteor related paper:

Search for shower’s duplicates at the IAU MDC. Methods and general results.

This article has been submitted for publication by T.J. Jopek, L. Neslušan, R. Rudawska, and M. Hajduková.

Abstract: Context. The meteor shower database of the IAU Meteor Data Center (MDC) is used by the whole community of meteor
astronomers. Observers submit both new and known meteor shower parameters to the MDC. It may happen that a new observation of an already known meteor shower is submitted as a discovery of a new shower. Then, a duplicate shower appears in the MDC. On the other hand, the observers may provide data which, in their opinion, is another set of parameters of an already existing shower. However, if this is not true, we can talk about a shower that is a false-duplicate of a known meteor shower.
The MDC database contains such duplicates and false-duplicates, so it is desirable to detect them among the streams already in the database and those delivered to the database as new streams.
Aims. We aim to develop a method for objective detection of duplicates among meteor showers and apply it to the MDC. The method will also enable us to verify whether various sets of parameters of the same shower are compatible and, thus, reveal the false-duplicates.
Methods. We suggest two methods based on cluster analyses and two similarity functions among geocentric and heliocentric shower parameters collected in the MDC.
Results. A number of results of varying significance were obtained. Eight new showers represented by two or more parameter sets were discovered. 31 times there was full agreement between our results and those reported in the MDC database. 23 times the same duplicates as given in the MDC, were found only by one method. We found 27 multisolution showers for which the number of the same duplicates found by both method is close to the corresponding number in the MDC database. However for 60 multi-solution showers listed in the MDC no duplicates were found by any of the applied methods.
Conclusions. The obtained results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach of identifying duplicates. We have shown that in order to detect and verify duplicate meteor showers, it is possible to apply the objective proposal instead of the subjective approach used so far. We consider the identification of 87 problematic cases in the MDC database, among which at least some duplicates were misclassified, to be a particularly important result. The correction of these cases will significantly improve the content of the MDC database.

 

You can download this paper for free: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.04246.pdf (13 pages).

 

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