Night skywatchers can expect up to 200 meteors per hour during the peak of the August 2016 Perseid Meteor Shower tonight.
“Forecasters are predicting a Perseid outburst this year with double normal rates on the night of August 11-12,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Under perfect conditions, rates could soar to 200 meteors per hour.”
An outburst is a meteor shower with more meteors than usual. The last Perseid outburst occurred in 2009.
Every Perseid meteor is a tiny piece of the Comet Swift-Tuttle that orbits the sun every 133 years. Each swing through the inner solar system can leave trillions of small particles in its wake. When Earth crosses paths with Swift-Tuttle’s debris, specks of comet remnants hit Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate in flashes of light.
Most years, Earth might graze the edge of Swift-Tuttle’s debris stream, where there’s less activity. Occasionally, though, Jupiter’s gravity tugs the huge network of dust trails closer, and Earth plows through closer to the middle, where there’s more material.
This may be one of those years. Experts at NASA and elsewhere agree that three or more streams are on a collision course with Earth.
Meteor Fireballs Expected
In addition to hundreds of meteors per hour, the Perseid Meteor Shower produces more fireballs than any other meteor shower. A fireball is a very bright meteor, at least as bright as the planets Jupiter or Venus.
Cooke thinks the Perseids are rich in fireballs because of the size of the parent comet. Comet Swift-Tuttle has a huge nucleus–about 26 km in diameter,” said Cooke. “Most other comets are much smaller, with nuclei only a few kilometers across. As a result, Comet Swift-Tuttle produces a large number of meteoroids, many of which are large enough to produce fireballs.”
2016 Perseid Meteor Shower: Where To Watch
The Perseids meteor shower will be visible almost all over the world – but will be best seen in the northern hemisphere. A major determining factor on where a good place is to watch the Perseids meteor shower is local cloud cover and artificial light pollution. Lie on your back and look straight up. Allow about 45 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark.
2016 Perseid Meteor Shower: Where To Look
You can tell if a meteor belongs to a particular shower by tracing back its path to see if it originates near a specific point in the sky, called the radiant. The constellation in which the radiant is located gives the shower its name, and in this case, Perseids appear to come from a point in the constellation Perseus. Photo credit: NASA/JPL
2016 Perseid Meteor Shower: When To Watch
The best way to see the Perseids is to go outside between midnight and dawn on the morning of August 12th. Although the moon is bright enough to blot out some of the meteors, it sets around 1 a.m. on the morning of August 12th, just at the peak time for the best Perseid viewing.
TOP PHOTO: An outburst of Perseid meteors lights up the sky in August 2009 in this time-lapse image. Stargazers expect a similar outburst during next week’s Perseid meteor shower, which will be visible overnight on Aug. 11 and 12. Photo Credits: NASA/JPL
