Meta Research Bulletin ©2006

Meteor Storms and Outbursts

            Esko Lyytinen of Finland used the exploded planet hypothesis as a model for understanding and predicting the behavior of meteor storms, starting with the times and peak rates of two Leonid meteor storm events in 1999. Events of this type had never before been successfully predicted. Although nearly a dozen professional astronomer groups attempted predictions for the possible November 1999 storm, only three teams had results that were correct for the time of the event, and only Lyytinen had both the time and the peak meteor rate correct to within the stated error bars. The complete story of this prediction, the expedition, and its successful conclusion are beyond the scope of this paper, but may be found in the reference. [[15]]

            The same technique works for other streams and even for meteor outbursts. For example, Lyytinen also predicted a short-lived outburst of the Perseid meteors in August 2004. Yet it presumes that these meteoroids escape from orbit around a comet nucleus through the inner and outer Lagrange points, which allows us to estimate the time, place, direction, and speed of the escaping particles using just the law of gravity, even though we cannot see them. Other teams using the standard model were either unsuccessful, or had to use fitting to past meteor storms to empirically set their prediction parameters.