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Re: (meteorobs) Re: meteor notes NM
>LEW:I myself have seen at least 3 or 4 of these
"dashed-line" meteors (i.e., two or more bright segments of the trail,
separated by apparent darkness). I suspect that they're actually fairly
common, which only compounds Wayne's concern about how to explain them
>:George:My guess is that somewhere along the meteor's path, the glowing
heated up
material on the outside is suddenly ablated off, exposing the cold
interior...then having to reheat all over again to
incandescence...meanwhile
the object has moved along and appeared to be getting bright, dark and
bright
again.
George Zay
Me again:
Interesting idea George. I'm still a bit uncomfortable with it, but
it's the best so far :-) It seems hard to imagine that @ 60 kps it would
take too long to reheat in the denser lower layer it would be at, but if it
took 1/4 second, that would leave a gap of 15 km, so I guess it's a
reasonable idea.
Time to hit the meteor physics books again to figure out how long it would
take...
Wayne