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.

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.