The age and the probable parent body of the daytime arietid meteor shower

The daytime Arietid meteor shower is active from mid-May to late June and is amongst the strongest of the annual meteor showers, comparable in activity and duration to the Perseids and the Geminids. Due to the daytime nature of the shower, the Arietids have mostly been constrained by radar studies. The Arietids exhibit a long-debated discrepancy in the semi-major axis and the eccentricity of meteoroid orbits as measured by radar and optical surveys. Radar studies yield systematically lower values for the semi-major axis and eccentricity, where the origin of these discrepancies remain unclear. The proposed parent bodies of the stream include comet 96P/Machholz [McIntosh, B.A., 1990. Comet P/Machholz and the Quadrantid meteor stream. Icarus 86, 894 299-304. doi:10.1016/0019-1035(90)90219-Y.] and more recently a member of the Marsden group of sun-skirting comets, P/1999 J6 [Sekanina, Z., Chodas, P.W., 2005. Origin of the Marsden and Kracht Groups of Sunskirting 922 Comets. I. Association with Comet 96P/Machholz and Its Interplanetary Complex. ApJS 923 161, 551-586. doi:10.1086/497374.]. In this work, we present detailed numerical modelling of the daytime Arietid meteoroid stream, with the goal to identifying the parent body and constraining the age of the stream. We use observational data from an extensive survey of the Arietids by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR), in the period of 2002-2013, and several optical observations by the SonotaCo meteor network and the Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS). We find the most plausible scenario to be that the age and the formation mechanism of the Arietids is consistent with continuous cometary activity of 96P/Machholz over a time interval of,approximate to 112,000 years. The sun-skirting comet P/1999 J6 suggested by [Sekanina, Z., Chodas, P.W., 2005. Origin of the Marsden and Kracht Groups of Sunskirting 922 Comets. I. Association with Comet 96P/Machholz and Its Interplanetary Complex. ApJS 923 161, 551-586. doi:10.1086/497374.] may contribute to the shower, but the comet break up prior to 950 CE they propose does not reproduce all the characteristics of the observed shower. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.