Latest Meteor shower Stories
[ Watch the Video: ScienceCasts: Comet ISON Meteor Shower ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have been given the clearest view yet of a comet that is supposed to light up the skies later this year. Comet ISON is expected to create a spectacular show in the night sky in November, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided scientists with a great preview, months before its premier debut. Comet ISON is a "dirty snowball," meaning it is a clump of...
[WATCH VIDEO: Comet ISON Meteor Shower] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While Comet ISON’s eagerly anticipated encounter with the sun won’t even happen until November, it seems likely the fireball is already prepping a special encore performance for stargazers here on Earth. In January, the US space agency’s Swift spacecraft observed the comet ISON while it was still near the orbit of Jupiter. Even then, it had already become extremely active, with...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A meteor streaked across Russia’s early morning skies on Friday before violently exploding, sending a rain of debris onto the Earth below. The flash and boom shattered windows and meteor particles left damage in its wake, injuring more than 900 people in the Ural Mountains region. Marina Mokvicheva, regional health minister in Chelyabinsk, the Russian city that had felt the brunt of the impact, told the Washington Post that 985...
ESA Comet Halley, the originator of the Orionids meteor shower that lit up our skies last month – as they do every October – is seen here up close by ESA’s Giotto probe as it flew past the famous comet on 13–14 March 1986. Giotto was ESA’s first deep-space mission. It swept within 600 km of Halley, obtaining the first close-up images of a comet. Comets are considered to be the primitive building blocks of the Solar System and likely helped to ‘seed’ Earth with water....
Lawrence LeBlond for RedOrbit.com Residents in parts of Nevada and California were treated to a rare daytime celestial event that awoke some on Sunday morning with a loud explosion, according to a Fox News report. The event -- a meteor streaking across the morning sky -- was followed by hundreds of calls to 911 centers in the area reporting a deafening explosion, while some reported seeing the fireball blazing across the sky. The “big boom,” as it became quickly known across...
Arizona, Nevada and Southern California residents got a brilliantly bright treat Wednesday night as a possible fragment of an asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and streaked across the southwestern sky, according to a NASA scientist, after dozens of eyewitness reports were taken. Residents from Phoenix to Las Vegas reported to local authorities and various media outlets that they had seen a bright light moving quickly across the night sky west to east at around 7:45 pm PDT (10:45...
The annual Perseid meteor shower is a sky watching ritual with star gazers and photographers out in abundance every year for the light show. There have been uncountable photographs of this event over the years, but a fresh take on this is now available. NASA astronaut Ron Garan found himself in a unique position for this annual show, above the meteor and looking down from the International Space Station (ISS) as the space rocks turned to flame and fell through the atmosphere. Garan makes good...
The eerie glow that straddles the night time zodiac in the eastern sky is no longer a mystery. First explained by Joshua Childrey in 1661 as sunlight scattered in our direction by dust particles in the solar system, the source of that dust was long debated. In a paper to appear in the April 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, David Nesvorny and Peter Jenniskens put the stake in asteroids. More than 85 percent of the dust, they conclude, originated from Jupiter Family comets, not...
Amateur astronomers across the UK are preparing to tweet the world's first mass participation meteor star party, as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). Led by Newbury Astronomical Society, the Twitter Meteorwatch will take place from the evening of Tuesday 11th until the morning of 13th August 2009, covering the peak of the Perseids meteor shower.Meteors (popularly known as "˜shooting stars') are the visible streaks of light that result from the disintegration of...
In a forthcoming paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of Spanish astronomers link a brilliant fireball seen in 2008 to the breakup of a comet in 1920.Last July, people in Spain, Portugal and France watched the brilliant fireball produced by a boulder crashing down through the Earth's atmosphere. In a paper to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers Josep M. Trigo-RodrÃguez (Institute of Space Sciences,...
Latest Meteor shower Reference Libraries
Comet Tempel-Tuttle -- Comet Tempel-Tuttle is an inherently faint and typically unspectacular comet that has only been observed on a few apparitions over the past 600 years. Its most recent apparition was in 1998, when it reached perihelion on February 28. As expected, it showed little activity, and only a small tail. However, further inspection shows that this comet is more interesting than the first glance suggests. Its orbit is oriented in such a way that the comet makes a...
Comet Encke -- Because of its proximity to the Sun and its stable orbit, comet Encke is probably one of the most evolved comets that still remains active. It may represent a transition object between an active comet and the defunct comets that are thought to make up a significant percentage of the near-Earth asteroid population. The orbit of comet Encke is very stable both in its size and orientation because it can pass no closer to Jupiter than about 0.9 AU. This orbital stability...
