The most important and exciting astronomical event at the beginning of the year is the arrival of the Quadrantids meteor shower – as they wrote in the announcement. According to information, it is a meteor shower that ideally attracts an average of 130 meteors in the northern sky per hour, thus competing with the Perseid meteors in August (average maximum 84) and Geminid meteors in December (average maximum 88 meteors). Meteors per hour).
What are stars?
Shooting stars, or meteors, come from dust particles and pieces of rock hurtling through space at speeds several times the speed of a spaceship. A long, brightly lit ion channel is created in Earth's upper atmosphere, which people see as a meteor.
The parent body of the Quadrantid meteor shower is asteroid 2003 EH1, which is only 3 km in diameter. Interestingly, asteroids rarely produce debris clouds in their orbits that form the basis of meteor showers. However, the strange orb is still responsible for the Quadrantid meteor shower, suggesting that 2003 EH1 is actually the nucleus of comet C/1490 Y1, which astronomers in the Far East observed five hundred years ago. They wrote that this object could have left behind a thin cloud of dust that meets Earth every year in the first days of January, crossing our planet's orbit around the sun.
Let us be alert on Thursday, at dawn
According to information, the best time to observe the quadrilaterals is the hours before dawn on Thursday. The swarm's radiation will then rise to its highest levels, and at six in the morning it will approach its height above the eighty-degree horizon in the eastern sky.
The moon will not help us this time, as it is relatively close to the radiant, and will shine in the constellation Virgo at a 49 percent phase, which will certainly make it difficult to detect meteors of magnitude 3-6, which constitute the majority. Of the quatrains
– They add.
Meanwhile, the swarm is also filled with very bright fireballs, so with a favorable sky, there's a good chance of a stunning and memorable shooting star. The only thing to do is to look for a dark area devoid of city lights – like in Budapest, for example, reads the advertisement Normava or Harmashatar-hegy.
Cover image: Getty Images
