We do not have much accurate information about the new year, except for the premiere of one or two films and series. What awaits us is a mystery, although if we ask astronomers, they will rub their palms together excitedly and smile, seeing a huge shooting star. It is already expected on the fourth day of 2024. This is certain, but whether the weather conditions will be nice for us and whether we will see it remains to be seen. The Quadrantid meteor shower will arrive at dawn on January 4, with up to 130 meteors per hour, and will compete with summer's Perseids and December's Geminid meteors, the Svábhegy Star Observatory can read. In his statement.
Shooting stars, or meteors, consist of dust particles and pieces of rock that hurtle through space at speeds several times the speed of a spaceship. When it meets our Earth in the upper atmosphere, it forms a long, brightly lit ion channel. We see this as a shooting star.
Each meteor shower is named after the constellation (or actually a star) where the lines drawn by the meteors appearing in the shower converge. This is called a radiant swarm.
As for the region of the sky where the radiation falls, the French astronomer Jerome Lalande proposed a new constellation in 1795, which he called Quadrans Muralis. This constellation is no longer included in the list of modern constellations drawn up by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1922, but the meteor shower remains a quadrant.
The asteroid 2003 EH1, with a diameter of 3 kilometers, is responsible for the meteor shower. According to the astronomers' hypothesis, the asteroid is the nucleus of comet C/1490 Y1, which astronomers observed in the Far East five hundred years ago. This may have left behind a thin cloud of dust that meets our Earth every year, in the first days of January, crossing our planet's orbit around the sun.
The swarm is also full of bright fireballs, so with a favorable sky, we have a good chance of enjoying a truly spectacular shooting star.
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