Daily Image
13-12-2021
Imaging meteors with LOFAR / AARTFAAC
| Submitter: | Tammo Jan Dijkema, Cees Bassa, Mark Kuiack, Felix Bettonvil et al. |
| Description: | With the Geminids meteor shower peaking, we would like to report on observations we did with LOFAR / AARTFAAC12 during the Geminids, Quadrantids and Perseids last year. Meteors are well-known to reflect terrestrial radio emission (they are routinely used by radio amateurs to bounce their radio waves over the horizon), but our observations also show broadband radio emission from 30 to 60MHz. This emission was reported on in 2014 by the LWA for bright fireballs, and using the higher sensitivity and better spatial resolution of AARTFAAC12 we confirm that this emission is also present in weaker meteors. We were lucky enough to have access to the data of the CAMS BeNeLux project. In that project, citizen scientists record the sky with an optical camera to catch meteors. In one night of Perseids 2020, this network recorded and triangulated over 700 meteors. Over 200 meteors had counterparts in the AARTFAAC12-images we recorded! The emission mechanism for the broadband signal is currently unknown: it could be either reflected broadband terrestrial signal, reflected celestial emission, or intrinsic emission. We have presented our results at the International Meteor Conference 2021 and published the results in the WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization. A timelapse of AARTFAAC recordings is also available. The image shows a full-sky image of AARTFAAC12 during the Perseids 2020. It is integrated over 16 observing bands in the range 30-60MHz. In the inset, the red line shows the trail as was deduced from the optical observations. |
| Copyright: | - |
| Tweet |  |