Harianjogja.com, JAKARTA – Be sure to look up at the sky on the last morning of May, as the Tau Herculid meteor explosion is likely.
Explosion meteor The so-called meteor storm is a rare phenomenon of a meteor shower where there will be a meteor shower with a prediction of a thousand meteors per hour. But, it could also be that we on earth can’t see it at all.
The discovery of the periodic comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 occurred in 1930 by the Hamburg Observatory. This comet was later dubbed Comet 73P.
Astronomers Arthur Wachmann and Carl Schwassmann captured this fuzzball comet on a glass plate capture as an object of magnitude +9.5, moving through the constellation Hercules.
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Interestingly, Comet 73P orbits the Sun every 5.4 years at an angle of more than 11 degrees relative to the plane of the ecliptic. With this orbit, there is a high probability that the comet will become a beautiful object on May 31, 1930, passing 0.062 Astronomical Units (AU) (9.2 million km) from Earth.
Comet 73P was described as a poor performer during the 1930s sightings, where it only reached a magnitude of +7 and was never visible to the naked eye.
Surprisingly, astronomer George Van Biesbroeck noted that the comet appeared to be ‘spindle-shaped’ when viewed through the giant 40-inch refractor at Yerkes Observatory, where the comet’s core is estimated to be 1.3 km across.
After Comet 73P disappeared from view, not much else was seen of the comet until 1995, when its brightness increased dramatically. This 400-fold increase was even more dramatic, because the comet was actually more than 1.3 AU from Earth at the time.
Observations from the European Southern Observatory captured four separate fragments for what was once Comet 73P; subsequent observations by Hubble and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope in 2006.
When comets travel close to the Sun, they leave behind a stream of dust debris that is shed during the passage of the interior of their solar system known as the Tau Herculid meteor. If a planet happens to be in its path (such as Earth), a meteor shower occurs, witnessed as streaks drift silently across the sky. The Perseid and Geminid meteors are two major annual showers, originating from comets 109P/Swift-Tuttle and ‘rock-comet’ 3200 Phaethon, respectively.
Now, debris flows evolve over time, as the complex tug of the Sun and planets pulls them in and out of Earth’s path. The Andromedids, for example, where there was a great storm at the end of the 19th century, which has not been known since.
In 2022, the comet is expected to show itself again.
The main date and time to watch for a possible 2022 Herculid explosion is on the morning of Tuesday, May 31 at approximately 5:00 Universal Time or 01:00 Eastern Time EDT.
A tenfold increase over the expected Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of 14 per hour of the late 19th century stream could mean ZHR 140 (similar to the annual Geminids and Perseids) while a hundredfold increase could occur by 2022 Tau Herculids surpassing the rate actual storm, at over 1,400 per hour.
Tau Herculids are ‘slow rain’ at a speed of 16 km/s—slow, compared to November’s Leonids which are fast at 72 km/s.
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