This weekend is your chance to see an brilliant, and similarly mysterious, meteor shower called the Geminids meteor shower.
"The Geminids are my favourite,"
stated NASA Astronomer Bill Cooke in a launch,
"because they defy explanation."
So, what makes this meteor shower so unique?
To begin, astronomers only recently located what induced this shower in spite of having the possibility to have a look at it and study it on yearly basis because it became first seen in 1862.
It was not until 1983 when NASA's IRAS satellite helped clear the mysterious source — a small, rocky item referred to as 3200 Phaethon. Most meteor showers take vicinity while debris left behind from a comet falls towards Earth, burning up within the surroundings on the way down. The result is what we call a shooting star.
A meteor shower is when we see many shooting stars in a short amount of time. This year's Geminids meteor shower will have between 60 and 80 meteors an hour.
But, in contrast to normal meteor showers, the source of the Geminids, 3200 Phaethon, isn't a comet, but an asteroid. Of the 12 meteor showers that took place this year,only one other came from asteroids, according to American Meteor Society.
The 3 critical differences among asteroids and comets are:
Asteroids are positioned within the asteroid belt between the planets of Mars and Jupiter. Most comets are farther from Earth, beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Asteroids are made of metals and rocky material. Comets are fabricated from ice, dust, rocky substances and organic compounds.
When asteroids flow close to the sun, they retain most of their material whereas the ice in comets has a tendency to melt and vaporise leaving behind a dusty path that then results in meteor showers like Orionids, which come from the tail of the well-known Halley's comet.
Despite asteroids retaining most in their fabric to themselves, the Geminids is one of the maximum remarkable meteor showers of the year due to the fact there's a lot of particles falling to Earth, Cooke explains.
"Of all of the particles streams Earth passes via every year, the Geminids' is by way of some distance the maximum large,"
Cooke stated.
"When we add up the amount of dirt in the Geminid flow, it outweighs other streams by using factors of 5 to 500."
The reason for this is a complete mystery.
In 2009, a pair of planetary scientists on the University of California, Los Angeles tried to resolve it, but in the long run determined more questions than solutions.
When the asteroid became extraordinarily close to the sun, approximately half of between the sun and Mercury, the two scientists noticed 3200 Phaethon quickly shone two times as vivid as common. The rationalisation the two scientists, David Jewitt and Jing Li, came up with become that the asteroid must have ejected lots of dirt.
A big cloud of dust could scatter sunlight, making the overall object seem much brighter. The dirt ought to have been the end result of rocks breaking apart from the asteroid because of the solar's extreme warmness at the sort of close distance, a phenomenon that Jewiit and Li referred to as a "rock comet."
There was one problem with their rock comet theory, however: The quantity of dust this incident delivered to the asteroid's debris movement become absolutely insignificant — about 0.01% of the full stream's mass, which became now not almost sufficient to give an explanation for the spectacular light show we see every year.
One purpose Jewiit and Li proposed changed into that rock comets could have been extra catastrophic inside the past, spewing the wonderful quantities of rock that nowadays make up the 3200 Phaethon debris move.
"We simply don't know,"
Cooke stated.
"Every new factor we study the Geminids seems to deepen the thriller."