New nomenclature rules for meteor showers adopted

Abstract

The Shower Database (SD) of the Meteor Data Center (MDC) had been operating on the basis of stream-naming rules which were too complex and insufficiently precise for 15 years. With a gradual increase in the number of discovered meteor showers, the procedure for submitting new showers to the database and naming them led to situations that were inconsistent with the fundamental role of the SD — the disambiguation of stream names in the scientific literature. Our aim was to simplify the meteor shower nomenclature rules. We proposed a much simpler set of meteor shower nomenclature rules, based on a two-stage approach, similar to those used in the case of asteroids. The first stage applies to a new shower just after its discovery. The second stage concerns a repeatedly observed shower, the existence of which no longer raises any doubts. Our proposed new procedure was approved by a vote of the commission F1 of the IAU in July 2022.