A very young tau-Herculid meteor cluster observed during a 2022 shower outburst

Abstract

To date only very few meteor clusters have been instrumentally recorded. This means that every new detection is an important contribution to the understanding of these phenomena, which are thought to be evidence of the meteoroid fragmentation in the Solar System. On 31 May 2022, at 6:48:55 UT, a cluster consisting of 52 meteors was detected within 8.5 seconds during a predicted outburst of the tau-Herculid meteor shower. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the atmospheric trajectories of the meteors and use the collected information to deduce the origin of the cluster. The meteors were recorded by two video cameras during an airborne campaign. Due to only the single station observation, their trajectories were estimated under the assumption that they belonged to the meteor shower. The mutual positions of the fragments, together with their photometric masses, was used to model the processes leading to the formation of the cluster. The physical properties of the cluster meteors are very similar to the properties of the tau-Herculids. This finding confirms the assumption of the shower membership used for the computation of atmospheric trajectories. This was the third cluster that we have studied in detail, but the first one where we do not see the mass separation of the particles. The cluster is probably less than 2.5 days old, which is too short for such a complete mass separation. Such an age would imply disintegration due to thermal stress. However, we cannot rule out an age of only a few hours, which would allow for other fragmentation mechanisms.