Quadrantid Meteor Shower

Until the mid-ninth century, Earth's orbit did not intercept the debris stream due to perturbations caused by Jupiter in its orbits. Studies conducted throughout the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that the debris stream's orbit can undergo significant changes over a thousand-year period, thus explaining the lack of observations of meteor showers associated with the Quadrantids before the 9th century. However, according to a study published in 2005 by Wiegert & Brown, it is possible that the high flow we observe today has a more recent origin, on the order of a few centuries in the past. It is therefore possible that the Quadrantid debris stream has two distinct components: an older component accumulated over a long period of time and another component composed of ejected material recently placed into orbit.

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There have been several proposals to explain the origin of the debris, one of which, published by Hasegawa in 1979, proposed comet C/1490 Y1. Studies of this comet's orbit by Williams & Wu demonstrated the possibility that this comet, in the mid-17th century, made a close pass by Jupiter.

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Another proposal for the origin of the debris was comet 96P/Machholz made by McIntosh in 1990. In 2004, with the discovery of asteroid 2003EH1 and the association of its orbit with the orbit of the debris, the possibility of the asteroid being a fragment of comet C/1490Y1 was raised. In 2004, Williams et al. proposed the possibility that both comet C/1490 Y1 and asteroid 2003 EH1 were both fragments of comet 96P/Machholz. In 2013, Jopek and Williams proposed that the older component of the Quadrantids arises from the activity of comet 96P/Machholz, while the more recent component arises from the fragmentation of this comet, which subsequently generated asteroid 2003 EH1. This scenario was validated in an article published in 2016 by PB Babadzhanov et al after careful analysis of the orbits of comet 96P/Machholz, asteroid 2003 EH1 and debris.