Reply to post: Re: Picking nits

Watch hot 'stars' shower ... again. It's Perseid meteor showtime

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Picking nits

In addition to the ridiculous graphics there's also "Jupiter’s gravitational field nudges the meteors 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) closer to Earth, making them appear brighter and twice as frequently across the sky."

Hmm... The particles of dust etc. shed by comet Swift-Tuttle, from which the Perseids are derived, are in independent orbit around the Sun and are spread out all along that orbit. However, the particles are not tightly packed and closely following each other along that orbit but are spread out to either side of it, interestingly enough (because of the figures quoted by El Reg), over a total width, as it were, of ~0.1 AU, or ~1.5 million km/930000 miles. It is because the width of that stream of particles that we can see them over a period of several days, as it takes that long for the Earth to obliquely pass though the entire stream.

At Jupiter's closest approach to that orbital stream (once again using El Reg's numbers of 257 million kilometres/160 million miles), it will be ~1.7 times further away from the closest particles than Earth is from the Sun. Now whilst Jupiter can certainly perturb the orbit of those closest particles, at that sort of distance, stating that it will move them closer to Earth, when the distance is already effectively 0 for the couple of days it takes Earth to pass through them is just nonsensical.

As for the brightness and frequency, well...

C'mon El Reg, you're just making yourself look stupid.

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