Characterisation of chaos in meteoroid streams. Application to the Geminids

Abstract

Dynamically linking a meteor shower with its parent body can be challenging. This is in part due to the limits of the tools available today (such as D-criteria) but is also due to the complex dynamics of meteoroid streams. We choose a method to study chaos in meteoroid streams and apply it to the Geminid meteoroid stream. We decided to draw chaos maps. Amongst the chaos indicators we studied, we show that the orthogonal fast Lyapunov indicator is particularly well suited to our problem. The maps are drawn for three bin sizes, ranging from $10^{-1}$ to $10^{-4}$ m. We show the influence of mean-motion resonances with the Earth and with Venus, which tend to trap the largest particles. The chaos maps present three distinct regimes in eccentricity, reflecting close encounters with the planets. We also study the effect of non-gravitational forces. We determine a first approximation of the particle size $r_{lim}$ needed to counterbalance the resonances with the diffusion due to the non-gravitational forces. We find that, for the Geminids, $r_{lim}$ lies in the range $[3;8]\times 10^{-4}$ m. However, $r_{lim}$ depends on the orbital phase space.