The stargazers can lookout for the incredible “shooting stars” of the Geminid meteor shower the nights of December 13th and 14th, it has been revealed.
Alan MacRobert, senior editor at Sky and Telescope magazine, said that the Geminids are usually one of the two best meteor showers of the year and they are sometimes more impressive than the better-known Perseids of August.
Lower counts of Geminid meteors should be visible earlier on those evenings, and for a few nights before and after December 13th and 14th.
Geminids can appear anywhere in the sky, so the best direction to watch would be wherever the sky is darkest, probably straight up. Small particles create tiny, quick streaks. Occasional brighter ones might sail across the heavens for several seconds and may leave a brief train of glowing smoke.
The Geminid meteors are created by tiny bits of rocky debris (the size of sand grains to peas) shed from a small asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, which was discovered in 1983. Before then no one knew the source of the Geminid shower. Phaethon is small, only about 3 miles across, and it loops around the Sun every 1.4 years in an orbit that approaches the Sun closer than any other known asteroid.
Over the centuries bits of Phaethon have spread all along the asteroid’s orbit to form a sparse, moving “river of rubble” that Earth passes through in mid-December each year. The particles are traveling 22 miles per second (79,000 mph) with respect to Earth at the place in space where we encounter them. So when one of them dives into Earth’s upper atmosphere, about 50 to 80 miles up, air friction vaporizes it in a quick, white-hot streak.
—-ANI