Quadrantids Source Discovered

linuxwrangler writes "Man has observed the annual Quadrantid meteor shower since antiquity but its source has remained unknown. Astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute predicted that the source would turn out to be the burnt-out core of an ancient star. Now, just in time for this year's display, the source has been discovered right where Jenniskens predicted."

Comments

Article is really bad

[Uma Thurman]

First the article says that it was an ancient star that exploded, and at the end it says that it was an ancient comet that exploded.

Meteors are pieces of asteroids or comets that are visible when they intercept the Earth's atmosphere.

It's absolutely preposterous that a star that exploded 500 million years ago could:

Throw a rock into Earth's orbit. Any supernova within a few dozen light years would have destroyed life on Earth at the time. Any supernova would have pulverized a chunk of rock too. And even if a rock somehow came from a distant supernova, we'd never be able to figure it out a half-billion years after the fact.

I attribute the complete absurdity of this article to a science writer who doesn't know anything about science. Or, it could have been an incompetent editor who screwed up the article. Anyway, it completely sucks.

What they did in fact discover is that a particular asteroid is the parent of the meteor stream. This is interesting to know, but hard to dig out of that ill-written article.

Editing

[astroboscope]

I attribute the complete absurdity of this article to a science writer who doesn't know anything about science. Or, it could have been an incompetent editor who screwed up the article.

Look again - the SFGate's science editor is the writer. And is the paper's main editor going to overrule the science editor on a science article? Don't think so. Hopefully this is just a temporary situation, like the editor filling in while the astronomy/physics reporter is on holiday or something.

Dare I ask why /.'s editor didn't catch this?

"Star" should be "comet"

[Bryant]

The real scoop can be found here, from the San Jose Astronomical Association (or in a shorter version .

Ancient star?

[[rvr]]

In Jennisken's paper 2003 EH1 is the Quadrantid shower parent comet is is stated that the source of the meteor shower is a comet... and cannot be different, because the debris nature of meteors. Ancient star cores are very compact and dense objects, with a higher mass than Jupiter.

orbit geometry

[boarder]

Actually, it can be true.

The article just says it orbits between Jupiter and Earth, but doesn't mention its geometry. The orbit could be highly elliptical, with its perihelion being lower than Earth's and apohelion being higher than Earths's. At some point in its orbit, it would be "orbiting" between Earth and Jupiter.. at another point it would be crossing orbital paths with Earth on its way to perihelion.

Yes, it is terrible use of terminology (indicative of the rest of the article), but it could kind of be considered possible.

Go easy on the autor ...he's apologised.

[deglr6328]

I emailed him from the address given in the article (not something I'd usually even consider doing but given the extremely poor quality of the article I did) and his reply follows:

Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:13:40 -0800
From: Perlman, David
[ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ]
To:
Subject: RE: Quadrantids Article

That article was written by me carelessly and in haste; we will publish a brief correction tomorrow, but I can only apologize for its total confusion. I've emailed everyone who complained and can only apologize again --it is far below my usual standards.
-----Original Message-----
From: roch1west@excite.com [mailto:roch1west@excite.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 12:49 PM
To: Perlman, David
Subject: Quadrantids Article

I do believe this: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/ 12/31/MNGCC4152J1.DTL is the most poorly written science article I've ever read. It's too hard even to understand what you may have been trying to convey to the reader here; just plain bad. Somehow it was posted to Slashdot anyway though. Have fun reading the comments there! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/3 1/1754258&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160

one more thing he got wrong...

[OneOver137]

Bootes is known as "The Herdsman", "The Ox Driver", or "The Ploughman". "The Hunter" is reserved for the constellation Orion.