So you watched the trailer created by Adrian West of Newbury AS and now it’s time to get out and Look Up.
You should be looking east/south east towards the constellation of Gemini and Orion (shown below)
The meteor shower will appear in the constellation of Gemini (hence it’s name) and is caused by an object called 3200 Phaethon which used to be thought of as an asteroid, but has since been discovered to be an extinct comet. Because the comet had too many encounters with the Sun it’s no longer a ‘dirty snowball’ but a rocky skeleton.
The meteor shower is expected to peak at around midnight of 13 December and it’s rumoured that if conditions are good it could be possible to see between 120 and 140 meteors an hour
Credit: J.T. Clarke, G.E. Ballester (University of Michigan), and J.T. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and NASA
On the 16 July 1994 every one was watching Jupiter. No, Arthur C Clarke’s story about the monolith hadn’t come true. A comet was about to slam into the gas giant.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been pulled into orbit around Jupiter. It’s speculated that this happened during the 1970’s. During it’s time in orbit around Jupiter, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been ripped apart by the formidable tidal forces of the planet.
No one was sure what would happen when the comet collided with Jupiter. There were suggestions of huge seismic waves rippling across the planet or perhaps the comet debris would behave like meteors do in our own atmosphere.
The Galileo space probe was in the perfect place to observe as the drama unfolded. As the first comet fragment struck the atmosphere of Jupiter, Galileo detected a fireball. Its temperature peaked at 24,000°C (43,232°F) and created a plume of disturbed gas 1,900 miles (3,000km) in height. Minutes later a huge dark spot came into view where the fragment had impacted.
The cometary fragments continued to bombard Jupiter until 22 July and the wounds on the planet were visible for months.
This dramatic event reminds us that Jupiters gravitational field is responsible for collecting many rogue bodies that wonder past it. This means that there’s less chance that the Earth is going to be hit by something that could destroy all life.
The image on the right of comet Holmes was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in March 2008. 5 months previously the comet had brightened incredibly.
Once very 6 years comet 17P/Holmes travels towards the Sun from the area of Jupiter. It always follows the same route and usually this occurs without incident. But during the last 116 years comet Holmes has twice exploded, once in November 1892 and the second time in October 2007. On both occasions it exploded as it reached the asteroid belt. As yet astronomers have offered no explanation as to why this happened.
