New publication - The challenge of identifying interstellar meteors
The paper on “The challenge of identifying interstellar meteors” was published (open access), to which the Astrophysical dust group has contributed.
The size-frequency distribution graph from the paper was added with some explanations, to the external pageWikipedia page on InterstellarObjectscall_made.
Detections of interstellar meteors have been reported in a number of publications in the last two decades, using radar and optical techniques. Also interstellar dust particles were observed in space with dust detectors on satellites. These were larger than expected from interstellar abundances and classical models of the interstellar dust size distribution.
However, how reliable are the interstellar meteor results? How easy is it to distinguish interstellar from interplanetary meteors? Especially with the recent discoveries of the two first interstellar objects (1I/‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov), the study of the dynamics of particles in size range from large interstellar dust towards interstellar meteors becomes of increasing interest.