(meteorobs) Quick Perseid 'Clump' Observation

[Steven Kolins]

On Aug 14, 2010, at 5:07 PM, dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de wrote:

>> 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 ...

Indeed - thanks for the paper. I see it explaining larger fluctuations but not the pairs or triplets but a statistical review would have to be done to work out such details.

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Steven Kolins
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