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Re: (meteorobs) Re: The Leonid Meteor Outburst of 1997
George Zay asked:
>What would keep a "tightly bound clump of tiny meteoroids in an orbit roughly
>matching tempel-tuttle" from not dispersing within 33 years or more so that
>it would appear as a less than 2 second outburst?
Tony didn't explicitly state that the constituents of this putative clump left
Tempel-Tuttle at the same time: he just proposes that such a clump may account
for this outburst. I'm assuming the clump could have formed from disparate
elements within the stream by orbital resonance or some other mechanism?
My question is, wouldn't it at least be possible, assuming we had well-bounded
trajectories for each individual consituent of the outburst, to "subtract out"
the forces we know acted on these particles in the near-Earth environment, and
from that derive a conclusion at least as to whether they were travelling
closely enough together that there MIGHT be electostatic cohesion? I assume if
this one video was our sole record of the event, the answer must be no... :)
Just curious,
Lew Gramer
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