Category: Cool Space Articles

Meteor Shower Name	Start and End Date (Peaks Vary by Year)	Typical Meteors/Hour	Radiant Constellation	Description
Quadrantids	January 1 to 6	60	Boötes, near the Big Dipper	Blue meteors with fine trains. Likely associated with Comet C/1490 Y1.
Lyrids	April 16 to 25	10 -15	Lyra	Bright fast meteors, some with trains. Associated with Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, the oldest recorded meteor shower still visible today and first recorded in 687 BCE.
Eta Aquariids	Apr 24 to May 20	35	Aquarius near the star Eta Aquarii	Low in sky. Associated with Comet Halley.
Delta Aquariids	July 12 to August 23	20	Aquarius near the star Delta Aquarii	Steady stream of meteors over several days. Likely associated with Comet 96P/Machholz.
Alpha Capricornids (no link)	July 15 to August 25	5	Capricorn	Yellow slow fireballs. Associated with Comet 169P/NEAT.
Perseids	July 23 to August 20	75	Perseus	Many bright fast meteors with trains. Associated with Comet Swift-Tuttle (1737, 1862, 1992).
Draconids	October 2 to 16	10	Draco	Less active meteor shower. Associated with Comet 21/P Giacobini-Zimmer
Orionids	October 16 to 27	25	Orion	Fast with fine trains. Associated with Comet Halley (Comet 1P/Halley).
Taurids	September 10 to December 10	10	Taurus	Very slow meteors. Taurids are two separate showers including a Southern and Northern component. Associated with Comet 2P/Encke, a remnant of a larger comet that disintegrated the last 20,000 to 30,000 years. Note, some resources refer to the Northern Taurids as being associated with the asteroid 2004 TG10, that also shares the same parent body as Comet 2P/Encke. The Beta Taurid meteor stream is the suspected source of the massive and devastating June 1908 Tunguska airburst.
Leonids	November 15 to 20	30-300	Leo	Fast bright meteors with fine trains. Associated with Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The 1833 storm was particularly spectacular, with an estimated 100,000 meteors per hour.
Geminids	December 7 to16	75	Gemini, near the star Castor	Plenty of bright meteors, few trains. Associated with Asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Only major meteor shower not associated with a comet.
Ursids	December 7 to 25	5	Ursa Minor, near the Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab)	Sparse shower. Associated with Comet 8P/Tuttle.

Much of the information listed above was gathered from the Royals Museum Greenwich website. To check on specific dates for peak observation times, please click the links above.

Click on the image and then use magnify. Then, by scrolling sideways the user gets an excellent perspective of the relative size of the 88 known objects (from 2007) in our solar systemThe Sun and set of objects orbiting around it including planets and their moons and rings, asteroids, comets, and meteoroids. larger than 322 kn (200 miles) in diameter.

Image shows a sliver of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, and all four of Pluto’s small moons, as resolved by New Horizons spacecraft. Charon has a diameter of 751 miles (1,212 kilometers). Nix & Hydra have comparable sizes, approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) across in their longest dimension above. Kerberos and Styx are much smaller and have comparable sizes, roughly 6-7 miles (10-12 kilometers) across in their longest dimension. All four small moons have highly elongated shapes, a characteristic thought to be typical of small bodies in the Kuiper BeltRegion in the outer solar system beyond Neptune's orbit that contains billions of small, icy planetesimals from the original protoplanetary disc that failed to coalesce into planets. The Kuiper Belt extends from Neptune's orbit at 30 AU to ~55 AU. It is ~20x wider and 20-200x more massive than the Click on Term to Read More.

A CometConglomeration of frozen water and gases (methane, ammonia, CO2) and silicates that that formed in the outer solar system and orbits the Sun. In recent years, the description of comets has shifted from dirty snowballs to snowy dirtballs with more dust than ice. However, the ratio is less than 10-to-1. Click on Term to Read More Gets Eaten By The SunOur parent star. The structure of Sun's interior is the result of the hydrostatic equilibrium between gravity and the pressure of the gas. The interior consists of three shells: the core, radiative region, and convective region. Image source: http://eclipse99.nasa.gov/pages/SunActiv.html. The core is the hot, dense central region in which the! Check out the videos available on NASA website.

The Solar & Heliospheric Observatory SOHO) is a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep coreIn the context of planetary formation, the core is the central region of a large differentiated asteroid, planet or moon and made up of denser materials than the surrounding mantle and crust. For example, the cores of the Earth, the terrestrial planets and differentiated asteroids are rich in metallic iron-nickel. Click on Term to Read More to the outer coronaExtended outer atmosphere of the Sun. The glow of the corona is a million times less bright than that of the photosphere; it can only be seen when the disk of the Sun is blocked during a total solar eclipse, or by using a coronagraph, which artificially blocks the disk Click on Term to Read More and its solar windSupersonic flow of high-speed charged particles continuously blowing off a star (mostly e- and p+). When originating from stars other than the Sun, it is sometimes called a "stellar" wind. The solar wind may be viewed as an extension of the corona into interplanetary space. The solar wind emanates radially. The SOHO spacecraft captured the arcing orbitThe elliptical path of one body around another, typically the path of a small body around a much larger body. However, depending on the mass distribution of the objects, they may rotate around an empty spot in space • The Moon orbits around the Earth. • The Earth orbits around Click on Term to Read More of a sungrazing comet as it approached the Sun (Jan. 3, 2010) and evaporated. The comet is believed to belong to the Kreutz family of comets that broke up from a much larger comet many hundreds of years ago. They are known to orbit close to the Sun. This comet was one of the brightest sungrazing comets that SOHO has observed in its 14 years of operation. SOHO’s coronagraph instruments block out the Sun with an occulting disk; the white circle represents the size of the Sun. The comet was discovered on Jan. 2nd by Australian amateur astronomer Alan Watson, who was inspecting images obtained by STEREO-A’s Heliospheric Imager on Dec. 30, 2009.

Earth is saved! Again… It seems our Grandfather planetThe term "planet" originally comes from the Greek word for "wanderer" since these objects were seen to move in the sky independently from the background of fixed stars that moved together through the seasons. The IAU last defined the term planet in 2006, however the new definition has remained controversial. Click on Term to Read More Jupiter has saved Earth from certain annihilation yet again. An invisible threat made itself visible on June 3rd when a rogue asteroid slammed into Jupiter and created a brilliant explosion visible from the relative safety of our own home planet.

At 20:31:29 on June 3rd, 2010 Anthony Wesley, an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer in Australia captured on video, an actual asteroid impacting the gas giant Jupiter. The brilliant flash and fireballA fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus as seen in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a special type of fireball which explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation. Click on Term to Read More created by this impact is said to be the equivalent of thousands of nuclear explosions detonating at once.

This isn’t the first time Anthony found evidence of an asteroid impact on Jupiter. Last year on July 19, 2009 Anthony took this now world famous photo.

The coolest part about this most recent event is that Anthony captured the actual impact on video!

Jupiter acts as our bodyguard. The massive forces of gravityAttractive force between all matter - one of the four fundamental forces. Click on Term to Read More that Jupiter exert on celestial bodies which come close enough are enough to rip apart huge comets and asteroids and suck them into the depths of it’s gaseous atmosphere thereby removing the threat of that body impacting with the Earth.

There is so much unseen debris floating around out there in space. We’re finding more new NEO (Near Earth Objects) every day. Literally. It’s only a matter of time until we findMeteorite not seen to fall, but recovered at some later date. For example, many finds from Antarctica fell 10,000 to 700,000 years ago. Click on Term to Read More another object that might just impact Earth like we did with Asteroid 2008 TC3. This particular asteroid was found by Richard Kowalski with the Catalina Sky Survey. Richard is an asteroid hunter, and discovered the first asteroid ever in the history of mankind to have been predicted to impact Earth. Not only was the time of asteroid impact predicted, but the place of impact and subsequently meteorites were found by scientists thanks to this data.

Jupiter has saved our planet from asteroid and cometConglomeration of frozen water and gases (methane, ammonia, CO2) and silicates that that formed in the outer solar system and orbits the Sun. In recent years, the description of comets has shifted from dirty snowballs to snowy dirtballs with more dust than ice. However, the ratio is less than 10-to-1. Click on Term to Read More impacts more times than we can ever fathom. However, that doesn’t mean there’s not another asteroid out there with our name on it. Let just hope that Jupiter keeps on doing what it’s been doing for billions of years.

Protecting Earth…

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From Spaceweather.com – “...I still can’t believe that I caught a live impact on Jupiter,” says Go, who has made a must-see video of the event.

“There were no visible remains at the impact point for the next half hour or so, until sunrise put an end to the imaging,” says Wesley…”

Jupiter Asteroid Collision Resource Links:

• Fazekas, Andrew “Bright Fireball Slams Into Jupiter” –  National Geographic, June 4, 2010
• Moskvitch, Katia “Jupiter collision ‘was asteroid’” –  BBC News, June 4, 2010
• Collins, Hugh “Amateur Astronomers Spot Massive Fireball on Jupiter” –  AOL News, June 4, 2010