The 62 newly proposed meteor showers have names like the Microscopiids and the beta Camelopardalids. “It got a little tedious to give them all new names,” says team leader Peter Brown. Above, a Perseid meteor streaks through auroras above Colorado in 2000 (Image: Jimmy Westlake)

Every now and again, biologists turn up a bonanza of new species deep in the ocean or in remote corners of the Earth. But astronomers usually have to make do with a trickle of new discoveries, spotting a rare supernova here or a couple of backwards planets there.

Now, researchers in Canada report finding an incredible 62 new meteor showers, displays of ‘shooting stars’ that recur every year when Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by a comet or asteroid.

“I was surprised to find so many new ones,” says team leader Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario.


He credits the wealth of discoveries to the nature of his survey, which detects incoming debris about 10 times as small as can generally be seen by eye, catching objects about 0.1 millimetres across. The survey, based near London, Ontario, uses radar to detect the trail of ionised gases produced as the debris particles slam into the atmosphere at blistering speeds.

The survey measures the paths of the debris particles, allowing researchers to trace their orbits around the sun – and potentially track down their parent bodies. “The central reason for looking at these streams is to trace them back to their origins,” Brown told New Scientist.

‘Archaeological record’

Over seven years of observations, the project has identified 117 annual meteor showers, of which 62 have never been reported before.

Interestingly, the team found that about half of the 117 observed streams follow orbits similar to those from other meteor showers. That bolsters previous research suggesting that the parent objects – mostly comets – likely broke up into smaller bodies that also shed debris trails – a break-up process that can occur over and over.

“In some cases, we can still trace [the trails] back to some parent objects; in others, we can’t see an obvious parent,” says Brown. For example, his team found half a dozen streams linked to Comet Encke, the parent body of the well-known Taurid meteor shower.

The 62 newly proposed showers join nearly 300 others that are awaiting confirmation by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which to date has officially recognised 64 meteor showers.

Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in California, who heads up the IAU group tasked with naming meteor showers, says the new finds will be a boon to science: “Each shower is an archaeological record of some comet’s past activity.”