PREDNASAJUCI / LECTURER :

Silvia Ďurišová

NAZOV / TITLE :

Interstellar meteors - hyperbolic meteoroid orbits in meteor databases

ABSTRAKT / ABSTRACT :

About 30 years ago, spacecraft missions Ulysses and Galileo confirmed the presence of interstellar
dust inside our solar system. In the last decade, the first two sub-km sized objects of interstellar
origin (asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua and comet 2I/Borisov) were detected and confirmed as well. It is
believed that in the meteor databases there are meteoroids with hyperbolic orbits, which might be of
interstellar origin. However, it is well-known by meteor scientists that hyperbolic orbits in the
meteor databases (especially those created by automatic pipelines) are mostly result of errors. At
the moment, we generally lack the required precision to distinquish true hyperbolic orbits (that
cannot be explained by processes inside our solar system) which would indicate real interstellar
particles.
Individual meteor databases might contain thousands or hundred thousands of meteors, out of which up
to 12 percents might have calculated hyperbolic orbits. This percentage reflects the quality of the
data in the database, but it also depends on the type of the observed population. We will look at
the selected databases, the calculated errors within and talk about the methods for assessing the
quality of the data with the focus on possible interstellar meteors.