Corkscrew Meteor Mystery

While photographing the recently discovered comet Machholz the other night, Jimmy Westlake's mind wandered back to a mystery that'd been bugging him for years. On Jan. 1, 1986, he was photographing another comet, Halley's, through his homemade 8-inch reflecting telescope.

"About one minute into the exposure, I watched a meteor zip through the field of the telescope," said Westlake, a professor of physical sciences at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs, CO. "I stopped the exposure at two minutes."

That night, when he developed the roll of slide film, he was astounded at what he saw:

"Crossing the tail of Halley's comet was a corkscrew meteor trail with no fewer than 25 twists in it," he said. "I had read of some meteors appearing to have curves or kinks in their trails, but I had never seen a photo of one."

Years later Westlake ran across an old astronomy book by Camille Flammarion and happened upon a sketch someone had made of a daytime fireball trail that looked almost exactly like his corkscrew meteor, "including the dark-colored inner curls," he said.

Westlake's photo was never published until today. He wonders if there are others out there.

Fascinating.

In the photo, at first glance the meteor trail appeared like it might be a long, skinny, sinusoidal tube. When the image was imported into Paint Shop Pro and stretched across its width, it was found that the impression of the long period sinuousness occurred became the object undulated slightly during its flight.

On the short term, the width of the trail seemed to remain fairly constant between its valleys and peaks. Those valleys and peaks are shape points, not rounded as I would expect if the object were rotating and caused the corkscrew effect -- but that may be because of the extreme stretch by a factor of 10 I applied to the width. The periods between peaks appeared somewhat erratic over the first half of the trail, then settled into a uniform period.

Ramblings: If this is an image taken through an 8 inch telescope, then it should be safe to assume the object was dim and its flight was over a very short apparent distance (conventional telescopes' fields of view are small). The original meteoroid was very small, smaller than the "grains of sand" or flicks of "cigarette ash" that cause the meteors we see with our naked eyes.

What was its nature? I haven't a clue. It would be interesting to know why it undulated in flight, and why it rotated or "viberated" so rapidly -- at least 25 times in a period of time shorter than one second.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.