Scientists discovered that asteroid Phaethon, the source of the Geminid meteor shower, has a tail made of sodium, not dust. This finding challenges 14 years of understanding about the object and raises questions about the nature of some comets. The origin of the Geminid meteor shower's material rema
spotted a short tail extending from Phaethon as the asteroid reached its closest point to the Sun along its 524-day orbit. Regular telescopes hadn’t seen the tail before because it only forms when Phaethon is too close to the Sun to observe, except with solar observatories. STEREO also saw Phaethon’s tail develop on later solar approaches in 2012 and 2016. The tail’s appearance supported the idea that dust was escaping the asteroid’s surface when heated by the Sun.
However, in 2018, another solar mission imaged part of the Geminid debris trail and found a surprise. Observations from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe showed that the trail contained far more material than Phaethon could possibly shed during its close approaches to the Sun. Zhang’s team wondered whether something else, other than dust, was behind Phaethon’s comet-like behavior. “Comets often glow brilliantly by sodium emission when very near the Sun, so we suspected sodium could likewise serve a key role in Phaethon’s brightening,” Zhang said., based on models and lab tests, suggested that the Sun’s intense heat during Phaethon’s close solar approaches could indeed vaporize sodium within the asteroid and drive comet-like activity.
The Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory imaged asteroid Phaethon through different filters as the asteroid passed near the Sun in May 2022. On the left, the sodium-sensitive orange filter shows the asteroid with a surrounding cloud and small tail, suggesting that sodium atoms from the asteroid’s surface are glowing in response to sunlight.
Hoping to find out what the tail is really made of, Zhang looked for it again during Phaethon’s latest perihelion in 2022. He used the
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