CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- The 2013 Geminid Meteor Shower, which NASA says
begins December 4 and runs through December 17, will peak on the nights of December 13th and 14th, 2013. The Geminid Meteor Shower is the most intense meteor shower of
the year and can
be seen from almost any point on Earth.
When to watch tonight's meteor shower:
The 2013 Geminid meteor shower will begin around 9 p.m. every evening at the viewer's respective local
time. The meteor shower will be the most intense and directly overhead
during the hours of 1 to 3 a.m.
A near full moon coincides with the Geminid meteor shower peak this year. But the Geminds are so bright that they should still put on a spectacular show.
Where to watch tonight's meteor shower:
Geminid meteors stream from a point called "the radiant" in the constellation Gemini. They will rise in the east around 9 p.m. and be directly overhead at 2 a.m. The meteor shower sets in the western
sky just before sunrise.
According to NASA, the Geminids
are generally regarded as one of the best annual meteor showers. But
before the mid-1800's there were no Geminids, or at least not enough of
them to attract attention.
The first Geminid shower suddenly appeared in 1862, surprising sky watchers who saw 15 or so shooting stars each hour.
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| Geminids Located In Gemini Constellation |
Most
meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a
night of 'shooting stars.' The Geminids are different. The parent is
not a comet but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very
little dusty debris—not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.
"Of all the debris streams Earth
passes through every year, the Geminids' is by far the most massive,"
says NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. "When we add up the amount of dust in
the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500."
3200 Phaethon was discovered in 1983 by NASA's IRAS satellite and promptly classified as an asteroid.
"If
3200 Phaethon broke apart from asteroid Pallas, as some researchers
believe, then Geminid meteoroids might be debris from the breakup,"
speculates Cooke. "But that doesn't agree with other things we know."
Researchers have looked
carefully at the orbits of Geminid meteoroids and concluded that they
were ejected from 3200 Phaethon when Phaethon was close to the sun—not
when it was out in the asteroid belt breaking up with Pallas. The
eccentric orbit of 3200 Phaethon brings it well inside the orbit of
Mercury every 1.4 years. The rocky body thus receives a regular blast of
solar heating that might boil jets of dust into the Geminid stream.
SOURCE: NASA
