This Memorial Day weekend, Earthlings, especially those in North America, could enjoy the sight of a new meteor shower.
Those meteors it could explode when our planet crosses the pieces of a disintegrating comet called Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3). It’s not just one exciting opportunity for sky watchers; comet scientists are also looking forward to the meeting. According to NASA, meteor showers could surprise (or disappoint) during Memorial Day night (Monday, May 30) and arrive early Tuesday.
SW3 is quite close to the sun comet standards; completes one orbit of our star once every five years. In 1995, it began to break, breaking into dozens of smaller chunks and leaving behind a cloud of rubble that continues to spin in the sun.
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We’ve seen split quotes before. One in 100 periodic comets, and perhaps even more, could be broken over time, according to William Reach, an astronomer at the SOFIA Science Center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
Famous, in the 1990s, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 it collapsed and large chunks crashed into Jupiter. But even if the ongoing disintegration of SW3 seems a bit similar, the process is “almost certainly not the same,” Reach told Space.com.
Scientists are not entirely sure what causes comets to break. It can be one or a combination of several factors. Shoemaker-Levy 9 sank under the stress of Jupiter’s powerful gravitational pull, for example. But some other comets could break when the volatile compounds they contain, such as water, heat up and pass from the solid to the gaseous phase.
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In addition, the constant rocking of a comet from the inner solar system to the outer and much colder back puts thermal stress on the body. Having enough repeated tension, something could give.
In any case, SW3 is breaking. And in recent decades, Earth’s orbit has been approaching our planet to cross the resulting cloud of rubble. This year, finally, seems to be the year we spend there. If this is the case, much of the comet’s remains will fall into it Earth’s atmosphere and they burn like meteors, some of which could be spectacular.
No doubt astronomers expect this to happen; they want to observe closely the fragments of a celestial object. In fact, an astronomer, Jeremy Vaubaillonhe plans to get even closer by flying over New Mexico and Arizona during meteor showers.
“By flying through it, even just knowing it exists, this shows that the particles survived,” Reach told Space.com. “We don’t really know. Some of them are frozen and don’t survive.”
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As comet fragments enter the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists can observe how they fragment, which can reveal information about their composition. And some of these fragments may come from the depths of a comet, a realm that astronomers cannot access just by looking at an object with a telescope.
In addition, the possible meteor shower offers a rare opportunity for astronomers to get their hands on some comet material. In the past, after all, NASA has blown up particle traps through meteorite currents to pick up dust left over from the early days of the solar system.
“It’s basically like having a space mission, going to the comet and taking it back, except the comet just shot them here,” Reach said.
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