\u201cModern meteor networks capture a wealth of observational information, and we wanted a framework that could fully take advantage of that,\u201d said Lowell Observatory astronomer Nick Moskovitz, who co-authored the study, published in May in the journal Science Direct.<\/p>\n
AI may help astronomers classify meteors<\/p>\n
The researchers then turned to artificial intelligence, using a combination of machine learning algorithms to identify natural groupings in the data they collected.<\/p>\n
The analysis led the team to settle on three main factors that determine what happens to meteors when they enter Earth’s atmosphere:<\/p>\n
\u2022 how the meteoroid is moving through the atmosphere, including its speed<\/p>\n
\u2022 how easily it begins to heat up and glow<\/p>\n
\u2022 and how its size and shape influence how it breaks up.<\/p>\n
Those factors further led to a new classification system that ranks a meteoroid on a hardness scale that the researchers refer to as “Hclass.” That nuanced scale reveals more about a meteoroid’s composition, which may range from dense, iron-rich material originating mostly from asteroids, to more fragile, porous debris that often sheds from a comet.<\/p>\n
About meteors, meteorites and meteoroids<\/p>\n
Rocks in space are known as meteoroids. If those space rocks enter Earth’s atmosphere, they become meteors that streak across the sky in events colloquially referred to as “shooting stars.”<\/p>\n
Meteors \u2013 or fragments of them \u2013 that survive their atmospheric trip and land on the surface without burning up become meteorites, according to NASA.<\/p>\n
What causes meteor showers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cModern meteor networks capture a wealth of observational information, and we wanted a framework that could fully take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[181,15789,134865,6626,134867,134868,309178,197,7117,130056,13549,26530,16492,79,780,193,14678],"class_list":["post-717776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-astronomer","tag-astronomical-objects","tag-astronomy","tag-bodies-of-the-solar-system","tag-local-interstellar-cloud","tag-lowell-observatory","tag-meteor","tag-meteor-shower","tag-meteoroid","tag-outer-space","tag-physical-sciences","tag-planetary-science","tag-science","tag-solar-system","tag-space","tag-space-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}