“It will be interesting to see if the rates are low this year, or if we will get a spike in numbers before next year’s forecast outburst,” Cooke said. Until Halley’s comet is next visible from Earth in 2061, only the eta Aquariids – and their fall counterpart, the Orionid meteor shower, which is visible each October – mark the passage of this solar system visitor. A 2013 eta Aquariid composite from a camera used in New Mexico.Ĭredits: NASA Meteoroid Environment Office ![]() The shower is named for the brightest star in that constellation, eta Aquarii. Its radiant – or the point in the night sky from which the meteor shower appears to originate – is the constellation Aquarius. “It’s a perfect opportunity for space enthusiasts to get out and experience one of nature’s most vivid light shows,” Cooke said.įirst up, on the night of May 5 and early hours of May 6, around 3:00 am CDT, is the eta Aquariid shower, caused by the annual encounter with debris from Halley’s comet – remnants of the comet’s tour through the solar system once every 75 or 76 years. Meteor showers, however, are caused by streams of comet and asteroid debris, which create many more flashes and streaks of light as Earth passes through the debris field. On any given night, the average person can see from 4 to 8 meteors per hour. Hitting the upper atmosphere at speeds up to 45 miles per second, they flare and burn up. Most particles are no bigger than dust and sand. “Earth is bombarded every day by millions of bits of interplanetary detritus speeding through our solar system.” A meteor mosaic comprised of 99 images, using a blue filter, of the Eta Aquariids observed during the early morning hours from April 30 to May 8, 2013. “Meteors aren’t uncommon,” Bill Cooke said, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. We can only hope it’s spectacular.Īs the spring season continues, May could prove to be of great interest for stargazers and space enthusiasts – with a pair of potentially active meteor showers opening and closing the month. The peak time to watch is around 1am on the East Coast or 10pm on the West Coast. Observers in North America under clear, dark skies have the best chance of seeing a tau Herculid shower. If a meteor shower does occur, the tau Herculids move slowly by meteor standards – they will be faint.This is one reason why astronomers are excited. Spitzer observations published in 2009 indicate that at least some fragments are moving fast enough.If the fragments from were ejected with speeds greater than twice the normal speeds-fast enough to reach Earth-we might get a meteor shower.The comet, which broke into large fragments back in 1995, won’t reach this point in its orbit until August.On the night of May 30 into the early morning of May 31, Earth will pass through the debris trails of a broken comet called 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, or SW3.So, we’re encouraging eager skywatchers to channel their inner scientists, and look beyond the headlines. The flame-like objects are the comet’s fragments and their tails, while the dusty comet trail is the line bridging the fragments. And some astronomers predict a dazzling display of tau Herculids could be “hit or miss.” This infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the broken Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 skimming along a trail of debris left during its multiple trips around the sun. We get excited about meteor showers, too! But sometimes events like this don’t live up to expectations – it happened with the 2019 Alpha Monocerotid shower, for example. ![]() Some has been accurate, and some has not. And that excitement has sparked a lot of information about the tau Herculids. Astronomers are excited about the possibility of a new meteor shower May 30-31.
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