While it is possible that we may see nothing at all extraordinary on Monday night, there’s the chance we may see hundreds, if not thousands, of meteors streaking through the sky.
Roughly 27 years ago, in 1995, astronomers watched as a comet began to shatter. Although comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 had been discovered some 65 years before, it had been a fairly unremarkable object for all that time. Even the meteor shower associated with it, the tau Herculids which peak at the end of May each year, barely produces any meteors at all. Since 1995, though, the comet brightened significantly as it broke into multiple fragments. This breakup also ejected a fair amount of dust and debris out around the comet.
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows an infrared view of the shattered remnants of Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3, strung out in a trail of beads along its orbit. The larger fragments can be seen to emit plumes of ice, dust and gas, which are pushed away by radiation pressure due to sunlight. (Credit: NASA)
Since then the tau Herculids have remained a fairly unimpressive meteor shower. Each year, it occurs between late May and mid-June, and peaks at the end of May. However, it usually produces so few meteors that it hasn’t been worth mentioning in any seasonal night sky observing guides.
This year is different, though.
On the night of May 30-31, 2022, astronomers believe there is a chance that Earth could pass through a concentrated cluster of debris from 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3. If that chance pays out, it will likely produce an outburst that rivals the major annual meteor showers, such as the Perseids or the Geminids. However, there’s also the potential that we could see thousands of bright streaks in the sky as it delivers a meteor storm!
The time to watch for this depends on where you live. Researchers with the Institute for Celestial Mechanics and Computation of Ephemerides at the Paris Observatory have shown that if an outburst occurs, it will be centred over California’s Baja Peninsula at around 10 p.m. PDT on May 30. Most of North America will be able to see it, with the exception of the Arctic and the Pacific Northwest.
For Canada, this means that the eastern half of the country has the best chance to see any outburst that may occur. The chances become more slim the farther west an observer is, due to the effects of twilight.
Meteor activity is expected to last for only a few hours, peaking around 1 a.m. EDT on Tuesday — 2:30 a.m. NDT, 2 a.m. ADT, 12 a.m. CDT, 11 p.m. CST/MDT, and 10 p.m. PDT.
Look towards the bright star Arcturus, in the southwestern sky, in the hours just after midnight, EDT, on the night of Monday, May 30 to Tuesday, May 31, 2022, for the radiant of the potential tau Herculids outburst. Credit: Stellarium/Scott Sutherland
ON THE OTHER HAND
Although we may see something truly awe-inspiring on Monday night, we shouldn’t get our hopes up too much.
“This is going to be an all or nothing event,” said Bill Cooke, of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.
Meteor showers are the result of Earth passing through streams of debris left behind by comets and some asteroids as they orbit the Sun. The key word in all of that, for this story, is behind. The tiny meteoroids in the debris stream are nearly always blown off the comet or asteroid to follow along in the wake of their parent object.
In the case of this potential outburst of the tau Herculids, it all depends on debris from 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 being ejected with enough force during the breakup to shoot it ahead of the comet.
The reason for this is due to the timing and relative positions of Earth, the comet’s orbit and debris stream, and the main fragments of the comet.
Normally, we see next to nothing at this time of year from the comet’s very diffuse debris stream. After the comet shattered, though, there was a lot more dust and debris located near the remaining fragments. If we could encounter some of that more concentrated debris, it would produce the outburst we’re looking for. However, the timing is off.
This orbit diagram shows the relative positions of the inner planets, the comet apparent primary fragment 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-C, and the comet’s orbit, on May 31, 2022, at 5 UTC. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Scott Sutherland
At the moment, those larger fragments of the comet are nowhere near us. They’re due to pass through our current location in space over the next few months. By then, though, Earth will be millions of kilometres away from where we are now, as the planet continues along its orbit around the Sun. So, for this outburst to happen, we need some of the debris to have shot so far ahead of the fragments that it is in our path on Monday night.
According to NASA, observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope did show that some of the debris was ejected with enough force that we should encounter it.
There’s no indication yet if the outburst is actually occurring, and we’ve certainly been disappointed by previous outburst predictions. However, we are seeing some promising signs.
The Spanish Meteor Network managed to capture a tau Herculid fireball on Friday night.
¡PRIMER BÓLIDO TAU HERCÚLIDA #SPMN270522H! Registrado ayer viernes sobre #Aragón por Antonio Lasala @AntonioLG1 a las 23h57m46s TUC. Ojalá sea el anuncio de muchos más fragmentos del cometa #73P #SW3 en las próximas noches. ¿Preparados para la campaña? ????https://t.co/TcmTt2hGHM pic.twitter.com/cm0gPwbCvA
Additionally, the Global Meteor Network detected its first tau Herculids, too.
First tau Herculids were detected last night by the #globalmeteornetwork. The geocentric radiant was R.A. = 203.2°, Dec = 17.7 deg based on 17 orbits. The activity seems to be only starting – first detected on May 28, 19h UT with a ZHR ~ 0.3 and not dropping. pic.twitter.com/MoU8CXVRIf
The questions that remain are 1) how much debris is in our path for Monday night, and 2) exactly how fast will it be travelling when it gets swept up by Earth’s atmosphere.
If there is only a small amount of relatively slow-moving meteoroids, we likely won’t see anything. The meteor shower may still occur, but as the researchers point out, it may only be picked up by Canadian Meteor Radar.
If there’s a lot of fast-moving debris, though, with plenty of ‘sand’ and ‘gravel’ mixed in with the dust, we could see a spectacular display light up the sky.
TIPS FOR WATCHING A METEOR SHOWER
Meteor showers are events that nearly everyone can watch. No special equipment is required. In fact, binoculars and telescopes make it harder to see meteor showers, by restricting your field of view. However, there are a few things to keep in mind so you don’t miss out on these amazing events.
The three best practices for observing the night sky are:
Check the weather,
Get away from light pollution, and
Be patient.
Clear skies are essential. Even a few hours of cloudy skies can ruin your chances of watching an event such as a meteor shower. So, be sure to check The Weather Network on TV, on our website, or from our app, and look for my articles on our Space News page, just to be sure that you have the most up-to-date sky forecast.
Next, you need to get away from city light pollution. If you look up into the sky from home, what do you see? The Moon, a planet or two, perhaps a few bright stars such as Vega, Betelgeuse and Procyon, as well as some passing airliners? If so, there’s too much light pollution in your area to get the most out of a meteor shower. You might catch an exceptionally bright fireball if one happens to fly past overhead, but that’s likely all you’ll see. So, to get the most out of your stargazing and meteor watching, get out of the city. The farther away you can get, the better.
Watch: What light pollution is doing to city views of the Milky Way
For most regions of Canada, getting out from under light pollution is simply a matter of driving outside of your city, town or village until a multitude of stars is visible above your head.
In some areas, especially in southern Ontario and along the St. Lawrence River, the concentration of light pollution is too high. Getting far enough outside of one city to escape its light pollution tends to put you under the light pollution dome of the next city over. The best options for getting away from light depend on your location. In southwestern Ontario and the Niagara Peninsula, the shores of Lake Erie can offer some excellent views. In the GTA and farther east, drive north and seek out the various Ontario provincial parks or Quebec provincial parks. Even if you’re confined to the parking lot after hours, these are usually excellent locations from which to watch (and you don’t run the risk of trespassing on someone’s property).
If you can’t get away, the suburbs can offer at least a slightly better view of the night sky. Here, the key is to limit the amount of direct light in your field of view. Dark backyards, sheltered from street lights by surrounding houses and trees, are your best haven. The video above provides a good example of viewing based on the concentration of light pollution in the sky. Also, check for dark sky preserves in your area.
When viewing a meteor shower, be mindful of the phase of the Moon. Meteor showers are typically at their best when viewed during the New Moon or Crescent Moon. However, a Gibbous or Full Moon can be bright enough to wash out all but the brightest meteors. Since we can’t get away from the Moon, the best option is just to time your outing right, so the Moon has already set or is low in the sky. Also, you can angle your field of view to keep the Moon out of your direct line of sight. This will reduce its impact on your night vision and allow you to spot more meteors.
Once you’ve verified you have clear skies and you’ve limited your exposure to light pollution, this is where being patient comes in.
For best viewing, your eyes need some time to adapt to the dark. Give yourself at least 20 minutes, but 30-45 minutes is best for your eyes to adjust from being exposed to bright light.
Note that this, likely more than anything else, is the one thing that causes the most disappointment when it comes to watching a meteor shower.
If you step out into your backyard from a brightly lit home and looking up for a few minutes, you might be lucky enough to catch a rare bright fireball meteor. However, it’s far more likely that you won’t see anything at all. Meteors may be streaking overhead, but it takes time for our eyes to adjust, so that we can actually pick out those brief flashes of light. Waiting for at least twenty minutes, while avoiding sources of light during that time (streetlights, car headlights and interior lights, and smartphone and tablet screens) dramatically improves your chances of avoiding disappointment.
Sometimes, avoiding your smartphone or tablet isn’t an option. In this case, set the display to reduce the amount of blue light it gives off and reduce the screen’s brightness. That way, it will have less of an impact on your night vision.
You can certainly gaze into the starry sky while you are letting your eyes adjust. You may even see a few of the brighter meteors as your eyes become accustomed to the dark.
Once you’re all set, just look straight up and enjoy the view!
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
