“Modern meteor networks capture a wealth of observational information, and we wanted a framework that could fully take advantage of that,” said Lowell Observatory astronomer Nick Moskovitz, who co-authored the study, published in May in the journal Science Direct.
AI may help astronomers classify meteors
The researchers then turned to artificial intelligence, using a combination of machine learning algorithms to identify natural groupings in the data they collected.
The analysis led the team to settle on three main factors that determine what happens to meteors when they enter Earth’s atmosphere:
• how the meteoroid is moving through the atmosphere, including its speed
• how easily it begins to heat up and glow
• and how its size and shape influence how it breaks up.
Those factors further led to a new classification system that ranks a meteoroid on a hardness scale that the researchers refer to as “Hclass.” That nuanced scale reveals more about a meteoroid’s composition, which may range from dense, iron-rich material originating mostly from asteroids, to more fragile, porous debris that often sheds from a comet.
About meteors, meteorites and meteoroids
Rocks in space are known as meteoroids. If those space rocks enter Earth’s atmosphere, they become meteors that streak across the sky in events colloquially referred to as “shooting stars.”
Meteors – or fragments of them – that survive their atmospheric trip and land on the surface without burning up become meteorites, according to NASA.
What causes meteor showers?