Probably the most common type
of AMP, nebulous meteors do not have the sharply defined contours of most
meteors. Instead, they appear fuzzy, often containing several bright central
nuclei.
Nebulous meteors may well be
highly friable objects that undergo several stages of disintegration. Fragmentation
is not unusual in meteor astronomy - about half of all fireballs show signs
of fragmenting due to thermal shock and high pressures - but the various
components usually spread out. In nebulous meteors they tend to keep fairly
close together. However, nebulous meteors last for only a couple of seconds,
at most, unlike fireballs that may take some time to cross the sky. It
could be that the individual fragments of a nebulous meteor would be seen
to diverge if they were to remain luminous for long enough.
Copyright 1996 Philip
M. Bagnall
Anomalous
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