1996A&A...306..995B

Meteor trains are luminous clouds produced by meteors which persist long after the meteor's disappearance. Their scientific visual observations go back to the nineteenth century. While the trains with the duration up to 3 seconds were positively identified with the radiation of the forbidden line of neutral oxygen at 5577A, the nature of the long enduring trains remains uncertain. The spectral information is very scarce. Various mechanisms were proposed to explain the luminosity but none is directly linked to observations. We have obtained good spectra of two enduring meteor trains during the 1993 Perseid maximum. The spectra contain prominent emissions of forbidden lines of ionized atoms, [OII] at 3726A, [SII] at 4069A, and [OIII] at 5007A. These lines have been known from gaseous nebulae but were quite unexpected in meteor trains. Besides them, our spectra contain also allowed lines of neutral atoms.