An observational synthesis of the Taurid meteor complex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We provide an overview of the observational properties of the four major Taurid showers, namely the Northern and Southern Taurids (#017 NTA and #002 STA), the β Taurids (#173 BTA), and the ζ Perseids (#172 ZPE). Analysing more than two decades of meteor observations from visual, optical, and radar measurements, we present the Taurids average activity, annual variations in strength, radiant drift, and orbital variations as a function of solar longitude and particle size. The Taurid showers are detected over several weeks in the spring and autumn, but their annual activity level is generally low (less than 15 visual meteors per hour). We find the STA to be pre-dominant in autumn, while its twin, the ZPE, dominates over the BTA in spring. Due to their long duration, the position of each shower’s radiant and orbital elements are variable with time. Optical measurements have previously recorded enhanced STA activity and increased fireball rates caused by the return of a swarm of meteoroids trapped in the 7:2 mean motion resonance with Jupiter. However, we find no presence of the swarm in radar data, suggesting that small meteoroids are removed from the resonance faster than fireball-producing meteoroids. We also find the STA to be enriched in smaller particles early in their activity period. The differences we identify in our analysis between the showers at different particle sizes provide strong observational constraints to future dynamical modelling of the Taurid Meteoroid Complex.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".