The 'silent world' of Comet 15P/Finlay

Comet 15P/Finlay is unusual in that, contrary to ab initio expectations, it demonstrates no apparent linkage to any known meteor shower. Using data contained within the Electronic Atlas of Dynamical Evolutions of Short-Period Comets, we evaluate theoretical shower radiants for Comet 15P/Finlay, but find no evidence to link it to any meteoric anomalies in recorded antiquity. This result, however, must be tempered by the fact that any Comet 15P/Finlay-derived meteoroids will have a low, 16 km s−1, encounter velocity with Earth's atmosphere. Typically, therefore, one would expect mostly faint meteors to be produced during an encounter with a Comet 15P/Finlay-derived meteoroid stream. We have conducted a D-criterion survey of meteoroid orbits derived from three southern hemisphere meteor radar surveys conducted during the 1960s, and again we find no evidence for any Comet 15P/Finlay-related activity. Numerical calculations following the orbital evolution of hypothetical meteoroids ejected from the comet, at each perihelion epoch since 1886, indicate that Jovian perturbations effectively ‘drive’ the meteoroids to orbits with nodal points beyond the Earth's orbit. The numerical calculations indicate that, even if Comet 15P/Finlay had been a copious emitter of meteoroids during the past 100 years, virtually none of them would have evolved into orbits capable of being sampled by the Earth. There are good observational data, however, to suggest that Comet 15P/Finlay is becoming a transitional comet-asteroid object, and that it has probably not been an efficient producer of meteoroids during the past several hundreds of years.