How a meteor shower helped solve the case of the vanishing comet
The cosmic streams of dust revealed the missing object became an asteroid
NOW YOU SEE IT In December 2014, astronomers spotted members of the Phoenicid meteor shower (one shown, bottom left) for the first time since its discovery in 1956.
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
The reappearance of a long-lost meteor shower has finally explained what happened to a missing comet named 289P/Blanpain.
That comet was spotted only once in 1819 and never again, unusual for a body orbiting the sun. But in 2003, astronomers found a small asteroid moving along the Blanpain orbit, suggesting the space rock might be the comet (or a piece of it) after it ejected much of its cometary dust.
Some of that dust may have been what Japanese researchers saw in 1956 when they observed a meteor shower from the constellation Phoenix. Meteor showers occur when dust left behind by a comet burns up as it hits Earth’s atmosphere. Those “Phoenicid” meteors hadn’t been seen before — or since.
Astronomer Jun-ichi Watanabe of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo and colleagues traced the meteors to where the comet’s dust trail should have been. In
