(meteorobs) Quick Perseid 'Clump' Observation

[dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de]

> Here's an idea - maybe the ejected material from a comet evaporates until
> two or three dust bits are glued together by frozen gasses which takes
> longer to evaporate as it's kind of shielded. Then when it does finally
> break up the last bits start close together and get a very gentle push
> from the last evaporation and orbit  pretty darn close to eachother until
> in the rounds of orbits it finally comes to us.

It's more complicated - but explained well in a paper on three
"short-duration 'outbursts', in which more than 20–40 meteors appeared in
a few seconds" during the Leonids maxima in 1997 and 2001:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003PASJ...55L..23W - since reading that
I've always wondered how to distinguish the phenomenon described there
from statistical fluctuations. When you wait for 15 minutes and then
suddenly see three Perseids within one second, you cannot but wonder ...

Daniel