New Scientist - USA (2022-01-15)

15 January 2022 | New Scientist | 51

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Boozing hamsters

and nominative

determinism p56

Tom Gauld for 

New Scientist

A cartoonist’s take

on the world p55

Almost the last word

The universe is

expanding, but

into what? p54

Puzzles

Try our crossword,

quick quiz and

logic puzzle p53

Twisteddoodles

for New Scientist

Picturing the lighter

side of life p56

Layal Liverpool is a science
journalist based in Berlin.
She believes everyone can
be a scientist, including you.
@layallivs

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These articles are

posted each week at

newscientist.com/maker

What you need
Access to Radio Meteor Zoo
via zooniverse.org

I WANT to hunt for shooting stars,

but it’s cold outside so I’m starting

the search from my living room.

You can do the same by joining the

Radio Meteor Zoo project online.

If you have ever seen a shooting

star, you were probably witnessing

a small solid object called a

meteoroid whizzing into Earth’s

atmosphere from outer space.

Meteoroids orbit the sun on

various trajectories at tens of

kilometres per second, sometimes

ending up on a collision course

with Earth. We see this as a meteor

flying through the atmosphere,

commonly referred to as a

shooting or falling star.

The Radio Meteor Zoo project

is calling for volunteers to help

identify signs of meteors in radio

data collected during meteor

showers, which occur when many

meteoroids pass through Earth’s

atmosphere in parallel. You can

find the project on the Zooniverse

citizen science platform.

As meteoroids fly through the

atmosphere, they leave trails of

ions and electrons behind that

temporarily reflect radio waves

transmitted from stations on

Earth. These reflected waves can

then be detected, and it is these

reflections that you can search

for in radio spectrograms online.

It is a lot easier than it sounds –

all you have to do is draw boxes

around all the characteristic bright

peaks, known as meteor echoes,

that you find on the spectrograms.

Researchers, including Stijn

Calders and Hervé Lamy at the

Royal Belgian Institute for Space

Aeronomy and their colleagues,

These celestial shows leave clues to their origin in their wake. You

can help astronomers unravel the mystery, says Layal Liverpool

Citizen science

Spot some shooting stars

can then use the meteor-echo

data to work out the mass, speed

and trajectory of the meteoroids.

That is because the duration of

each meteor echo is related to the

size of the meteoroid that caused

it. The insights gathered could

help modellers make predictions

about the activity of the comets

from which many meteoroids

originate, says Calders.

But the researchers need help

to dig through the deluge of data

flowing in via the Belgian Radio

Meteor Stations network – more

than 10,000 spectrograms are

generated every day. Automatic

algorithms can help with signal

classification, but so far none

are as astute as the human eye.

Fortunately, thousands of

volunteers have already lent

a hand by participating in the

project since it launched in 2016.
“Thanks to these volunteers,
we have analysed more than
35 different meteor showers,”
says Calders.
At the moment, the project is
processing data from the 2021
Geminids – a meteor shower
derived from an object called 3200
Phaethon, which was discovered
in 1983 and is thought to be an
asteroid. This makes the Geminids
unusual, because most meteor
showers originate from comets,
which are icy and dusty, rather
than asteroids, which are rockier.
To learn more about these
celestial events and to join in,
Citizen science appears visit Radio Meteor Zoo online. ❚
every four weeks

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