Phaethon, being an asteroid, shouldn’t produce a
meteor shower like it does. There are a lot of questions surrounding how an asteroid has a debris trail following it, and some researchers have wondered if something violent happened in the past to create the Geminids.
During its first close encounter in November 2018, the Parker Solar Probe observed faint space dust that was about 62,000 miles wide and about 12.5 million miles long, following Phaethon. This line of dust was in the Geminids’ expected orbit, leading astronomers to believe that it was actually the Geminids, viewed from space for the first time.