It may be very long, but “something spectacular” may hit the skies this holiday weekend. Experts say there is a chance that people living anywhere in America will see an extremely rare meteorite storm on Memorial Day after sunset.
Meteors can be seen as Earth traverses the remnants of a comet that separated three decades ago and is still fragmenting, CBS Denver reports. The comet, named “Schwassmann-Wachmann 3”, began to break in 1995, and its debris is expected to intersect with Earth’s orbit, which could lead to heavy rainfall. of meteors called Tau Herculids.
Hubble’s Advanced Survey Camera took pictures of the disintegration of comet fragment 73P / Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 B. NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (APL / JHU), M. Mutchler, and Z. Levay (STScI)
A meteor shower is classified as a meteor storm when at least 1,000 meteors occur per hour.
“If you really go down this broken path, you could see a lot of meteors every hour,” Fraser Cain, editor of the astronomy magazine Universe Today, told KCBS Radio.
However, Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society says that meteors entering the atmosphere must be larger than normal in order to be seen from the ground.
That’s why Lunsford says meteor shower is very unlikely, but adds: “We think this event is likely to be spectacular and it would be negligent not to release it.”
According to EarthSky.org, the famous 1966 Leonid meteor storm produced meteors falling at a rate of 40 meteors per second. Witnesses said they felt they had to grab the ground because of the impression of the Earth moving through space.
NASA says astronomers have been observing the comet for nearly a century, and the comet’s trajectory and path around the sun is well understood.
“Amateur and professional astronomers around the world have been following its spectacular disintegration for years,” NASA said.
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