New shower in Hercules

By Denis Vida and Damir Šegon

Abstract: The Global Meteor Network detected a new meteor shower of Halley-type comet origin. The shower activity period occurred in a very narrow time period of only 3.5 hours. The observed geometric radiant was at R.A. = 261.1 deg, Decl. = +47.3 deg, within a circle with a standard deviation of ± 1.1 deg (equinox J2000.0).

Introduction

The authors report an outburst of a new meteor shower with a radiant in Hercules. 32 meteors were observed by the Global Meteor Network (Vida et al., 2019, 2020, 2021) low-light video cameras on 2024 April 27 in a narrow time range between 20^h00^m – 23^h40^m UTC. Figure 1 shows the radiant cluster in the Sun-centered ecliptic coordinates.

The observations

The shower was independently observed by cameras in 11 different European countries (Croatia, Slovenia, the UK, Bulgaria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Spain, and Slovakia). Meteor shower members were extracted using the method described in Šegon et al. (2023) using the Drummond D criterion (Drummond, 1981). Figure 2 shows the distribution of the values of the D criterion from the mean orbit, with the bulk of the detected meteors having the value of the Drummond D criterion < 0.05.

 

 

The shower had a median geocentric radiant with coordinates R.A. = 261.1 deg, Decl. = +47.3 deg, within a circle with a standard deviation of ± 1.1 deg (equinox J2000.0). The radiants are shown in Figure 3. The median Sun-centered ecliptic coordinates were λ–-λ_ʘ = 214.24 deg, β = +70.15 deg. The geocentric velocity was 35.6 ± 0.9 km/s. The meteors were bright, most having peak magnitudes ranging from +1.5 to –3.0.

The orbital elements (equinox J2000.0) are those of a long-period comet:

• q = 0.95292 ± 0.00522 AU;
• e = 0.968 ± 0.068,
• i = 55.77 ± 1.02 deg,
• ω = 206.97 ± 1.55 deg,
• Ω = 37.8190.025 deg.

All meteors appeared during the solar-longitude interval 37.70 – 37.85 degrees, with a sharp peak at 37.80 deg. The bulk of all meteors, a total of 25, was observed in a narrow interval between 22^h00^m – 22^h45^m UTC (solar longitude 37.78 – 37.82 deg), as shown in Figure 4.

The parent body search did not return any candidates within the Southworth and Hawkins (1963) D criterion value of < 0.35.

The shower has been added to the IAU list of showers with a temporary name M2024-H1.

 

Acknowledgment

This discovery is based on the data of the Global Meteor Network which is released under the CC BY 4.0 license. We thank all the participants in the Global Meteor Network project for their contribution and perseverance, operators whose cameras provided the data used in this work and contributors who made important code contributions The Global Meteor Network results were obtained thanks to the efforts of the following volunteers (list cut-off date as it was at the end of 2023):

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