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Studies of meteor trails have until now been limited to relatively simplemodels, with the trail often being treated as a conducting cylinder, and thehead (if considered at all) treated as a ball of ionized gas. In this article,we bring the experience gleaned in other fields to the domain of meteorstudies, and adapt this prior knowledge to give a much clearer view of themicroscale physics and chemistry involved in meteor-trail formation, withparticular emphasis on the first 100 or so milliseconds of the trail formation.We discuss and examine the combined physico-chemical effects ofmeteor-generated and ablationally amplified cylindrical shock waves whichappear in the ambient atmosphere immediately surrounding the meteor train, aswell as the associated hyperthermal chemistry on the boundaries of the hightemperature postadiabatically expanding meteor train. We demonstrate that thecylindrical shock waves produced by overdense meteors are sufficiently strongto dissociate molecules in the ambient atmosphere when it is heated totemperatures in the vicinity of 6,000 K, which substantially alters theconsiderations of the chemical processes in and around the meteor train. Wedemonstrate that some ambient O2, along with O2 that comes from the shockdissociation of O3, survives the passage of the cylindrical shock wave, andthese constituents react thermally with meteor metal ions, thereby subsequentlyremoving electrons from the overdense meteor train boundary through fast,temperature independent, dissociative recombination governed by the secondDamkohler number. Possible implications for trail diffusion and lifetimes arediscussed.

On Shock Waves and the Role of Hyperthermal Chemistry in the Early Diffusion of Overdense Meteor Trains