Southern Taurid meteor shower will bring glowing fireballs in the sky

It doesn’t matter that Halloween is over, because the “Halloween fireballs,” as NASA calls them, can still be seen glowing in the night sky for weeks to come, thanks to the meteor shower called the Southern Taurids. English).

The estimated peak of rain is until Saturday (5) according to EarthSky. The Taurids are famous for producing the brightest fireballs – meteors that can appear brighter than the planet Venus.

This year’s rain is expected to include a greater number of fireballs, also known as the Taurid swarm. The South Taurids usually only shows about five meteors per hour around its peak, the point where Earth is closest to the center of the debris flow. But every seven years, Jupiter’s gravity tugs on the meteor stream and causes their numbers to increase.

“With the normal rate of fireballs, someone would have to sit outside for 20 hours straight to see one,” said Robert Lunsford, coordinator of fireball reporting for the American Meteor Society. “With Tauridas, [esse tempo] can be greatly reduced, perhaps even five hours. And if you’re really lucky, you can just walk out and within minutes see one. When they show up, it’s totally unpredictable.”

Origin of Taurids

Taurids are the result of the breakup of a very large comet about 20,000 years ago. Among other debris, this separation created Comet Encke, which has an orbit around the sun of just over three years, the shortest of any large comet in our solar system. Every time the Earth passes through its short orbit, it leaves a trail of debris behind. This trail includes the Southern Taurids, which are a cluster so large that it takes several weeks to pass through our planet.

“Most meteor showers contain small pieces of dust. Well, the Taurids also have some large particles,” said Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “And you’ll see, as long as the swarm is active, not dust particles, but pebble-sized particles — and some that are football-sized and larger, which obviously produce glowing fireballs.”

Seeing a fireball

The Taurid fireballs are meteors over a meter in diameter and shine brightly, according to NASA. They move slowly because they hit Earth’s atmosphere at a perpendicular angle, so they can be seen moving across the sky for a few seconds, compared to the millisecond of visibility most meteors provide.

The brightest and most enduring meteors can be seen fragmenting and falling apart as they travel across the sky, according to Lunsford. Fireballs are often colored, appearing red, orange, or yellow.

“It would be like a shooting star,” said Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society and creator of its fireball tracking program. “But instead of lasting half a second, it can last three or four seconds, and instead of being as bright as a star, it can be as bright as the moon — sometimes even brighter.”

This year, the meteor society has already recorded an above-average increase in fireballs, while NASA has photographed fireballs that appear to be even brighter than the moon in the night sky.

The best time to go out and detect a fireball will be 1 am Brasília time during the next week, according to Lunsford.

As the moon approaches the full moon stage set for November 8, its brightness will start to get in the way of the chances of fainter meteors being seen, but fireballs, due to their size and brightness, can be seen anywhere. in the world at any time during the night.

Other space events this year

There are four more meteor showers you might see in the remainder of 2022, according to EarthSky’s 2022 Meteor Shower guide:

• November 12: Taurids of the North
• November 18: Leonidas
• December 14: Geminids
• December 22: Ursids

And there are two more full moons in the The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2022 calendar:

• November 8: Beaver Moon (which will peak alongside a total lunar eclipse)
• December 7: Cold Moon