# Are there many faint meteors that are too faint to see with the naked eye?

I remember one time a while back looking at the night sky through night vision goggles. One interesting thing I noticed is that there appeared to be many very faint meteors in the sky practically all the time. I assume this is dust burning up in the atmosphere, or possibly an unusual effect produced by the night vision goggles themselves. I more suspect that it is dust burning faintly in the atmosphere because it was seen only in the sky. My main question is: Is space dust constantly entering the atmosphere as small meteors at a fairly high rate? If I remember right, it was a few every second, which is much more frequent than normal "brighter" meteors, even during a meteor shower.

• The abstract of ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19810031098 suggests there are more faint meteors than bright ones, but only at a linear rate of increase. With stars, the growth rate is exponential. leonid.arc.nasa.gov/meteor.html also notes that very small meteors can still be fairly bright. – user21 Nov 19 '14 at 13:35

The paper referred to by Barry Carter in his comments is Cook et al. (1980), which finds that log of the cumulative number of meteors is proportional to about half the astronomical magnitude. i.e. $$\frac{d \log \phi}{dm} \simeq 0.5$$ This means that the number of meteorites increases by a factor of $10^{0.5}$ for each unit increase in magnitude - i.e. also about 3.