In the last of this year’s celestial fireworks, a spectacular meteor shower will enthral skygazers on the night of December 13 and early hours of December 14.
The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on the late night of December 13, is the most intense meteor shower of the year, Director of M P Birla Planetarium in Kolkata and well-known astrophysicist Debiprasad Duari said in a statement on Saturday. It is considered to be most dazzling, active and dependable display of the fireballs in our sky.
This is the one major shower that provides good activity prior to midnight as the constellation of Gemini is well placed from 22:00 onward. The Geminids are often bright and intensely colored. Due to their medium-slow velocity, persistent trains are not usually seen. These meteors are also seen in the southern hemisphere, but only during the middle of the night and at a reduced rate.
This phenomenon was first recorded in 1862 and causes a show each December, and is thus most awaited. Geminid meteor shower can be viewed from every part of India if the sky conditions are favourable.
While it is expected around December 13-14 night, one can probably also see some meteors on early evening hours of December 14. The meteors will be visible around the world, but they will be more visible in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere, according to experts. People living below the equator will have the best chances to see the shooting stars in the middle of the night, and even then, less of them will be visible compared to those in the Northern Hemisphere.
Meteors are bright streaks of dazzling light that one often sees in the night sky and they are often termed as “shooting stars”. A meteor shower is a spike in the number of meteors or “shooting stars” that streak through the night sky.
In reality, when a rocky object, which can be as small as a speck of dust enters the earth’s atmosphere with a tremendous speed, because of the excitation of the air molecules and friction, a brilliant streak of light is produced, he explained.
During a certain period of the year, one gets to see not one but numerous meteors originating from a particular direction of the sky.
These are called meteor showers and in general are caused by the earth’s passage through the leftover debris of dust, left behind by different comets as they come near the Sun.
According to American Meteor Society, the asteroid 3200 Phaethon is responsible for this meteor shower, which is unusual because it’s usually comets, not asteroids, with icy debris that create meteor showers. Scientists have debated the very nature of what Phaethon is. The closely tracked near-Earth asteroid has been likened to comets, so it’s been called a “rock comet.”
Phaethon was discovered in October 1983 and named after the Greek myth about the son of Helios, the sun god, because it closely approaches our sun.
In general, comets are mostly made up of ice and dust and when they approach the sun, the ice in them melts leaving behind a trail of dust along its path.
As earth, in its yearly journey around sun passes through this dusty region, the dust and rocky substances enters the earth’s atmosphere, sometimes with speed between 30-60 km per second, and produce a shower of light streaks, called as meteor shower.
Since they seem to come from one direction of the sky, the practice is to identify the constellation from which they seem to be radiating and the meteor shower is named after the constellation.
Among the various meteor showers, one of the most spectacular is the Geminid Meteor shower which occurs every year around the second week of December.
This year, as per the predictions, it may be possible to see 150 meteors per hour given the sky is dark and clear. One should not be alarmed while viewing this “heavenly phenomenon, since these meteors will cause no harm to anything on Earth”, Duari said.