Every meteor shower represents a trail of debris shed by a comet or asteroid. Run the gravity and ejection physics backwards and a shower becomes a clock and a tracer — telling you which body produced it and when.
We combine decades of radar, video and visual observations with numerical models that follow millions of simulated meteoroids over thousands of years, ejected from a known parent and nudged by planetary gravity and solar radiation to better understand the origin, evolution and current extent of meteoroid streams near Earth. Our model efforts are now producing some of the highest fidelity predictions of future meteor shower activity available.
Streams we have modelled
- Perseids and Leonids — early stream simulations that successfully forecast the timing and strength of Leonid storms around 1999–2002.
- Arietids — we showed this daytime shower most likely formed more than 12,000 years ago from comet 96P/Machholz, rather than from a recent sungrazer break-up.
- Taurid complex — a sprawling family of streams and near-Earth asteroids linked to comet 2P/Encke; our dynamical work supports a single fragmentation event 5,000–6,000 years ago.
- τ-Herculids (2022) — a new outburst from the fragmenting comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, predicted and observed.
Because the streams are tied to specific parents, they are the only direct way to connect the physical properties of individual meteoroids to the comet or asteroid they came from.
Work on this as a student
Apply wavelet methods to 20 million radar orbits to discover new, low-speed showers linked to recent asteroid mass-loss.
Key publications
- Brown, P. & Jones, J. 1998. Simulation of the formation and evolution of the Perseid meteoroid stream. Icarus 133, 36–68.
- Egal, A., Brown, P.G. et al. The Taurid meteoroid complex (radar, optical and visual constraints).
- Abedin, A., Brown, P.G. et al. The age and formation of the Arietid meteoroid stream.
See also my PhD thesis on the Perseid and Leonid streams.