Bibcode
Bellot Rubio, L. R.; Martínez González, M. J.; Ruiz Herrera, L.; Licandro, J.; Martínez-Delgado, D.; Rodríguez-Gil, P.; Serra-Ricart, M.
Referencia bibliográfica
Astronomy and Astrophysics, v.389, p.680-691 (2002)
Fecha de publicación:
7
2002
Revista
Número de citas
30
Número de citas referidas
28
Descripción
Faint meteors observed with Super-Schmidt cameras are re-examined in
order to assess whether their dynamical and photometric behavior can be
described by means of the single body theory. Velocities, decelerations
and magnitudes are fitted simultaneously to synthetic curves resulting
from integration of the appropriate set of differential equations. The
parameters determined by this procedure are the ablation coefficient,
the shape-density coefficient and the preatmospheric mass of each
individual meteoroid. It turns out that 73% of the meteors analyzed here
(with magnitudes in the range from +2.5 to -5) are reasonably well
described by this theory, suggesting that they did not undergo
significant fragmentation during their atmospheric flight. Nevertheless,
we identify some systematic differences between observed and theoretical
light curves of meteors for which the fit is good. Meteoroid bulk
densities are estimated from the retrieved shape-density coefficients.
The distributions of individual values are broad, indicating that
objects of different densities coexist within the same meteoroid
population. The average density is found to be 2400, 1400, and 400 kg
m-3 for A-type, B-type and C-type meteoroids, respectively.
These results do not confirm the large values determined from
quasicontinuous fragmentation models.