Luminosity function of faint sporadic meteors measured with a wide-field CMOS mosaic camera Tomo-e PM

Abstract

Imaging observations of faint meteors were carried out on April 11 and 14, 2016 with a wide-field CMOS mosaic camera, Tomo-e PM, mounted on the 105-cm Schmidt telescope at Kiso Observatory, the University of Tokyo. Tomo-e PM, which is a prototype model of Tomo-e Gozen, can monitor a sky of $∼$1.98$∼$deg$^2$ at 2Hz. The numbers of detected meteors are 1514 and 706 on April 11 and 14, respectively. The detected meteors are attributed to sporadic meteors. Their absolute magnitudes range from +4 to +10mag in the V-band, corresponding to about $8.3\times10^{-2}$ to $3.3\times10^{-4}$g in mass. The present magnitude distributions we obtained are well explained by a single power-law luminosity function with a slope parameter $r=3.1\pm 0.4$ and a meteor rate $\log_{10}N_0=-5.5\pm 0.5$. The results demonstrate a high performance of telescopic observations with a wide-field video camera to constrain the luminosity function of faint meteors. The performance of Tomo-e Gozenis about two times higher than that of Tomo-e PM. A survey with Tomo-e Gozen will provide a more robust measurement of the luminosity function.

Publication
Planetary and Space Science

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