Meteor Showers: which ones are real and where do they come from?

Abstract

The IAU Meteor Shower Working List contains 369 showers, of which only 64 are considered established (per February 28, 2012). In this invited review, we will give an overview of international efforts to validate the remaining showers. We report on the showers that were validated in this triennium and proposed to receive the predicate “established" at the present General Assembly. The meteoroid orbit surveys characterize the meteoroid streams in terms of orbital elements and their dispersions, which is ground truth for efforts to identify their parent comets, study the fragmentation history of the (mostly dormant) comet population in the inner solar system, and understand the origin of the zodiacal cloud.