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Taurid meteors: Will there be a swarm this year?

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Whole-sky panorama with stars, moon, thin white streak.
You can see this meteor is radiating from the constellation Taurus the Bull. See that V-shaped pattern to the right and above Orion? That’s the Hyades star cluster, which forms the Bull’s Face. Eliot Herman in Tucson caught this Taurid meteor in 2015. The bright object was the moon! Thanks, Eliot. 2015 was the last good year for the Taurid meteors. Will there be a swarm this year?

What are the Taurid meteors?

The Southern and Northern Taurid meteor showers are active every year throughout the months of October and November. They’re billed as a major annual meteor shower, but observers rarely see more than five meteors per hour. Astronomers studying the Taurids found that Earth encounters a concentration of larger-than-normal debris at intervals of three or seven years. Close conjunctions with the planet Jupiter cause this concentration. Interestingly, only the southern branch has this concentration of debris. Fireballs, or meteors that are larger and brighter than anything in the sky except the sun and moon, probably come from these larger particles.

The Southern Taurids run from about September 10 until November 20, peaking around November 4/5. The Northern Taurids overlap them, running from around October 20 to December 10, peaking around November 12/13.

Will we see a swarm of Taurid meteors in 2022?

Taurid fireballs are often colorful and display fragmentation as they streak slowly through the sky. During a normal display, only 1% of all Taurid meteors are fireballs. In exceptional years, when the Earth passes through a concentrated field of debris, the percentage can be as high as 7%. So visual observers and astrophotographers may see several fireballs each night instead of the normal rate of one every 20 hours. The last time the Earth encountered a concentration or swarm of Taurid meteors was in 2015. That year, rates for the Southern Taurids reached 10 per hour with numerous fireballs, such as the one pictured above.

This year we have another opportunity to witness enhanced rates during a two-week period centered on the peak date of November 5th. Unfortunately, a full moon occurs on November 8th, so only a few hours of dark skies are available on the 5th. The moon will washout most meteors on the days after the predicted peak. However, fireballs are bright enough to shine through the moonlight. The best observing time is before the full moon arrives on November 8. However, if you’re out on the morning of November 8 watching the total lunar eclipse, maybe you’ll get lucky and spot some Taurid meteors as well.

The radiant of the Taurid meteor shower

The radiant of the Southern Taurids is located in western Taurus, south the the famous Pleiades star cluster. Due to the motion of the Earth around the sun, the radiant will drift eastward just under one degree each night and slightly northward. Therefore, if you are watching for Taurids in October, the radiant will be in the constellation Aries. Viewing after November 5, the radiant is slowly approaching the familiar V-shaped asterism of the Hyades in Taurus.

As seen from the Northern Hemisphere, the Taurid radiant lies above the horizon all night long. It’s highest near 2:00 a.m. local time. If observing during the evening hours, look eastward. Those viewing after 2 a.m. should face west. If the moon is in the sky, keep it out of your field of view to avoid ruining your night vision. The Taurid meteors are visible from most of the Southern Hemisphere but in lower numbers, because the radiant appears lower in the sky from places south of the equator.

The Taurid meteors consist of 2 streams, the South Taurid meteors and North Taurid meteors. Both streams appear to originate from near Taurus the Bull. You might see Southern or Northern Taurids throughout October and into November. Chart via Chelynne Campion/ EarthSky.

Observers can submit number of meteors sighted

Serious observers are invited to count the number of meteors observed and submit them to the International Meteor Organization (IMO). This option is for registered members, but it’s free to those who just wish to contribute data. It creates an observing log you keep and add to after each meteor shower session. To produce scientifically useful data, please refer to information on visual observations. Plus, you’ll want to determine your viewing conditions.

You should view for at least one hour to get a true picture of the overall activity. Also, check here for more tips on viewing meteor showers. Meteors rarely appear at regular intervals but often appear in spurts with gaps of five to 10 minutes with no activity. We advise observers use a comfortable lounge chair with a pillow and blanket. Being cold is no fun while out under the stars!

When are future swarms predicted?

The next predicted Taurid swarm is in 2025 and will most likely be weaker than 2022. Especially because a full moon occurs on the same night as maximum peak activity. Beyond that, 2032 appears to be an exceptional year, as the moon will be new and Earth will pass very close to the center of the swarm. Mark your calendar now!

The southern Taurid meteoroid debris in space

Studying the Taurids meteors for large hidden asteroids

Bottom line: Take advantage of this opportunity to witness a possible increase in fireball activity of Taurid meteors by viewing the sky from October 29 through November 7, 2022.

Source: An observational synthesis of the Taurid meteor complex

Meteor showers: Tips for watching the show

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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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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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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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.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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