Earth tumbles through the debris trail of comet Swift-Tuttle — producing the Perseid meteor shower, one of the year’s most anticipated sky shows, peaking Sunday night into Monday morning.
the shower, known for his occasional fireballssends shooting stars cascading from a bright point in the Perseus constellation in the northeastern sky. Although it has been running for a couple of weeks and will continue until the end of the month, Monday’s pre-dawn hours will provide the best show, with up to 90 meteors or more per hour possiblesay astronomers.
While the shooting star appears to flow out of the constellation Perseus, it is not the source of the meteors, NASA explains. It is left to Swift-Tuttle, discovered separately in 1862 by Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle. Its 10-mile-diameter nucleus puts it at the large end of the comet region, and it takes 133 years to orbit the sun, the space agency’s website says. In 1865 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made the connection between the meteor shower and the comet. The comet itself has not visited our inner solar system since 1992.
The moon, whose light has been known to get in the way, will be only a quarter, only a crescent, and it will set just before the real show begins. The best view is between midnight and dawn, but meteors can also be seen from after sunset – when Perseus will have risen above the northeastern horizon. Shooting stars that appear during this time will have long trajectories as they carelessly skim the Earth’s upper atmosphere, earning the moniker “earthgrazers”, points out Sky & Telescope.
As the night gets deeper and darker, more meteors will flash across the sky. Their light belies their size, given that the particles range from the size of grains of sand to boulders.
The slamming into Earth’s atmosphere at 133,200 mph — or 37 miles per second — burns up at temperatures higher than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Space.com. They become visible about 60 miles above the ground.
The Perseids are known for color bursts, particularly, as astronomer Don Pollacco of the University of Warwick said, “bright blue meteors — and lots of them.”
With News Wire Services