RAS: Earth's Dust Cloud Satellites Confirmed

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RAS: Earth's Dust Cloud Satellites Confirmed

Post by bystander » Sun Oct 28, 2018 1:58 pm

Earth's Dust Cloud Satellites Confirmed
Royal Astronomical Society | 2018 Oct 26
A team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists may have confirmed two elusive clouds of dust, in semi-stable points just 400,000 kilometres from Earth. The clouds, first reported by and named for Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961, are exceptionally faint, so their existence is controversial. ...

The Earth-Moon system has five points of stability where gravitational forces maintain the relative position of objects located there. Two of these so-called Lagrange points, L4 and L5, form an equal-sided triangle with the Earth and Moon, and move around the Earth as the Moon moves along its orbit.

L4 and L5 are not completely stable, as they are disturbed by the gravitational pull of the Sun. Nonetheless they are thought to be locations where interplanetary dust might collect, at least temporarily. Kordylewski observed two nearby clusters of dust at L5 in 1961, with various reports since then, but their extreme faintness makes them difficult to detect and many scientists doubted their existence.

In a paper earlier this year the Hungarian team, led by Gábor Horváth of Eötvös Loránd University, modelled the Kordylewski clouds to assess how they form and how they might be detected. The researchers were interested in their appearance using polarising filters, which transmit light with a particular direction of oscillation, similar to those found on some types of sunglasses. Scattered or reflected light is always more or less polarised, depending on the angle of scattering or reflection.

They then set out to find the dust clouds. With a linearly polarising filter system attached to a camera lens and CCD detector at Slíz-Balogh’s private observatory in Hungary (Badacsonytördemic), the scientists took exposures of the purported location of the Kordylewski cloud at the L5 point. ...

Celestial Mechanics and Polarization Optics of the Kordylewski Dust Cloud
in the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L5 – I. Three-Dimensional Celestial Mechanical
Modeling of Dust Cloud Formation
~ Judit Slíz-Balogh, András Barta, Gábor Horváth Celestial Mechanics and Polarization Optics of the Kordylewski Dust Cloud
in the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L5 – II. Imaging Polarimetric Observation:
New Evidence for the Existence of Kordylewski Dust Cloud
~ Judit Slíz-Balogh, András Barta, Gábor Horváth
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