Unprecedented meteor showers may light up Utah’s skies on Monday

Unprecedented meteor showers may light up Utah’s skies on Monday

An infrared image of Comet SW3 taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2006. The comet has been disintegrating since 1995, providing possible conditions for a meteor reception on Monday evening. (NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech)

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Salt Lake City – Patience can pay off for stargazers on Monday night as fresh meteor showers can appear with the potential to dramatically lighten the sky.

Astronomers believe material from a small comet, SW3, could cause a large meteor shower called Tau Herculids, which will peak around 11 p.m. Monday, according to space.com.

Space.com columnist Joe Rao points out that showers can have stronger annual meteor showers. These showers have been known to produce up to a hundred meteors per hour, as shown Meteor showers summary for 2022 Through the same space blog.

As an added bonus, there is little chance that Tau Herculids will propel themselves into a larger explosion or meteor storm, as thousands of meteors per hour can be seen pouring out of the night sky, Rao explains on his site.

However, all models and predictions can go wrong and the night sky can remain dark from Monday evening through Tuesday morning. It all depends on the timing of the Earth’s orbit and the orbit of comet SW3.

If the Tau Herculids reach their full potential, the resulting display will be among the most powerful meteor storms in history, said Patrick Wiggins, a local astronomer and solar system ambassador at NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Utah. Rao compares best-case scenarios to Leonid Meteor’s showers 20 years ago.

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Nobody can say for sure what will happen. newly Blog post by NASA More conservative, it does not even indicate the possibility of a storm.

Wiggins calls the probability of a storm “if it is significant”. However, that wouldn’t stop him from watching.

He said: “The only sure thing is that I will watch.”

Possibility to shower

Meteor showers occur when Earth encounters a swarm of debris left by a comet.

in press article For the international meteorites in 2022 Tau Herculids, Rao writes that at 11 p.m. Mount Monday, Earth will encounter SW3 orbit just before the comet itself. This seems to make the possibility of any meteorite activity in 2022 non-existent.

However, with further modeling, Rao determined that it was possible that the SW3 debris cloud had moved ahead of the comet, enough to produce rain. Support for two other studies for him Resultshe is writing.

In addition, Rao notes a similar collapse of a comet in the early 19th century, which led to the Andromeda meteor storms in 1872 and 1885. Rao’s paper notes that similarities between these two comets could support Hercules Tau’s storm predictions.

Notes to pay attention to

If you plan on viewing, Rao suggests following the normal protocol for watching meteor showers: warm clothes and a hot drink to combat the cold, a reclining chair to prop your neck, and a red flashlight to show your vision.

The names of meteor showers are usually formed after the point in the sky from which the meteors radiate, usually a constellation. When it was discovered in 1930, according to Rao’s paper, Hercules was expected to emit tau from the constellation Hercules.

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Today, the radiation will be closer to the constellation Bootes. To find this constellation, locate the handle of the Big Dipper and direct your view to the first bright star you see: Arcturus, the brightest star in Bootes.

You don’t have to look directly at radiation to see meteors in the shower. science writer and Former Director of the Hansen Planetarium Mark Littmann wrote a book about the great meteor storms in Lyon in the 19th century, in anticipation of the rains of 1998 and 1999, titled Heaven on Fire. In this book, he explains that looking away from a shower’s radiance will actually allow you to see longer tails.

However, if a storm occurs and thousands of meteors are raining, looking directly at the beam will give the illusion of flying through space, similar to Federation Championship In the TV series “Star Trek,” says Littman.

Rao warns that because the expected meteors will hit Earth on Monday evening, they will also appear fainter, making a darker sky a must. Any eventual storm, he adds, will be “short-lived, no more than several hours”.

Of course, weather is the main factor in any astronomical event.

Citing an old science fiction proverb, Wiggins said, “Look up at the sky.” “Everywhere. Keep watching. Keep looking at the sky.”

Pictures

Ryan Boyce is a science and history buff. His first writing project was compiling a history of space exploration on his third-grade teacher’s computer, and he hasn’t stopped writing since.

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