The
Perseid Meteor shower lasts from late July to early September each
year, and are expected to be at a peak on Thursday 11- Friday12 August 2016. The Moon is expected to be quite bright on that night, however it will be setting at about 1.00 am local time on 12 August (this will b the same wherever you are on Earth), which should mean could
viewing from most parts of the globe. The shower is expected to be particularly intense this year, possibly reaching 80-150 meteors per hour. The
Perseids get their name from the constellation of Perseus, in which the
meteors have their radiant (the point from which they appear to
originate), which will be rising at about 10.00 pm local time on 11 August.
The radiant of the Perseid Meteors. National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
The shower is caused by the Earth passing through the trail of the Comet
109P/Swift-Tuttle, and encountering dust from the tail of this comet.
The dust particles strike the atmosphere at speeds of over 200 000 km
per hour, burning up in the upper atmosphere and producing a light show
in the process.
The Earth does not need to pass close to 109P/Swift-Tuttle for the
meteor shower to occur, it simply passes through a trail of dust from
the comet's tail that is following the same orbital path. Comet
109P/Swift-Tuttle itself only visits the Inner Solar System once every
133 years, last doing so in 1992. It is currently 36.4 AU from the Earth
(i.e. 36.4 times as far from the Earth as the Sun, more than twice the
distance between Neptune and the Sun) on an eccentric orbit tilted at
113° to the plane of the Solar System (or 67° with a retrograde orbit -
an orbit in the opposite direction to the planets - depending on how you
look at it), that takes it from 0.95 AU from the Sun (95% of the
distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 51.22 AU from the Sun
(51.22 times as far from the Sun as the Earth, more than three times as
far from the Sun as Neptune and slightly outside the Kuiper Belt, but
only scraping the innermost zone of the Oort Cloud).
The orbit of 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Note that this is almost entirely below the plain of the Solar System. JPL Small Body Database Browser.
See also...
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