The most important and spectacular astronomical event of the beginning of the year is the arrival of the Quadrantids meteor shower – they wrote in the announcement.
According to the information, it is a meteor shower that ideally draws an average of 130 shooting stars in the northern sky per hour, thus competing with the Perseids in August (average maximum 84) and the Geminids in December (average maximum 88 shower meteors per hour).
Shooting stars, or meteors, come from dust particles and pieces of rock that hurtle through space at speeds up to several times the speed of a spaceship. A long, brightly lit ion channel is created in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which people see as a shooting star.
The parent object of the Quadrantid meteor shower is the asteroid 2003 EH1, only 3 kilometers in diameter. It is interesting that asteroids rarely produce debris clouds in their orbits that form the basis of meteor showers. However, the strange celestial body is still responsible for the Quadrantid meteor shower, which suggests that 2003 EH1 is actually the nucleus of comet C/1490 Y1, observed by astronomers in the Far East five hundred years ago. This object could have left behind the thin cloud of dust that meets the Earth every year in the first days of January, crossing our planet’s orbit around the Sun, they wrote.
2023-12-31 05:20:00
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