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A never-before-seen meteor shower could light up the sky with countless bright streaks from Monday night evening to Tuesday morning.

Or the event could go to waste and be a dud.

These are the best meteor watchers have for the Tau Herculids, a potential celestial spectacle that skywatchers are looking forward to.

Meteor showers can occur when Earth sinks into debris produced by a comet (or sometimes asteroids). The source of Tau Herculids is Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, or SW3 for short. Discovered in 1930, the junk ice ball originally clocked in about two-thirds of a mile in diameter, so it rarely produced enough material to produce large nighttime fireworks. In 1995, however, SW3 disintegrated producing a large field of fragments that our planet is about to encounter.

When and where can I see the possible shower?

If the Tau Herculids do occur, they will be most visible on the evening of Monday, May 30, and early morning on Tuesday, May 31, possibly around 1:00 pm Eastern, in the lower 48 in the United States. The further south you live, the better your vision will be. Skywatchers in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America are also favored to see some action. Those in high latitudes like Alaska are out of luck.

To take a shower, move away from the bright city lights and find the darkest and clearest possible spot with a few hills or other obstacles on the horizon. The moon will be new that night, so its light will not interfere with the screen. Wait about half an hour for your eyes to get used to the darkness.

“The best equipment is to go to the attic and pull that beach chair,” said Joe Rao, assistant astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. “Then sit back and look up.”

Meteor showers seem to emanate from a point in the sky known as a radian. The Tau Herculids, the meteor shower in SW3, were predicted to originate from the constellation of Hercules – hence the name of the shower – a prediction that has since turned out to be inaccurate.

The Tau Herculids will actually originate in the constellation Boötes, radiating just above the star Arcturus, a reddish-orange-yellow entity that would then be the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere’s sky. Finding Arcturus is easy if you can find the Big Dipper: simply draw a line from the last two stars on the handle of the Dipper away from its bowl. The first bright star you see must be Arcturus.

Unlike meteor showers, which can be seen for days before and after a busy night, if this spectacle does occur, it doesn’t last long.

“This is not a long-term event,” said Robert Lunsford, secretary general of the International Meteor Organization. “I would definitely try to be out at 10 PM Pacific or 1 AM in the East, because then if nothing happens, then it’s not an event.”

How many meteors can Tau Herculids produce?

“This is the $64,000 question,” Mr. Rao said. “There is no consensus. Forecasts are absolutely everywhere. ”

NASA models on the pessimistic sidesuggests that few or potentially no meteorites will appear. But Mr. Rao is pointing forecasts by respected meteor watchers on the other end of the spectrum, which estimates it will see 10,000 to 100,000 meteors per hour. If these are correct, Tau Herculids will be a meteor storm, and possibly one of the largest images in recorded history.

“I’d be happy to see just one in a whole hour,” said Mr. Lunsford. “But we’re likely to see one per second.”

Much will depend on the size and velocity of the debris hitting the atmosphere and how large the comet’s residual particles are.

“The particles can be the size of a grain of sand,” said Mr. Rao. “I think there should be at least pebbles, nuggets, even ping pong-ball sized things in there.”

If the pieces are on the smaller side, they can create many slow lines that are too dim for the human eye to see. Night sky enthusiasts have previously been smitten when announcing possible wonders that failed to live up to expectations, such as the supposed once-in-a-lifetime sighting of Comet Kohoutek in 2020.

“We have a lot of black eyes when predicting an amazing event and then nothing happens,” said Mr. Lunsford. “We need certain conditions for this meteor shower, and the probability is remote. But we owe it to the public to let them know it’s a possibility.”

Why might Tau Herculids appear for the first time?

Mr Lunsford said new meteor showers are rare events, “occurring only a few times in a century”.

But Mr. Rao said that in October 1995, astronomers began receiving calls from people claiming they had discovered a new comet. The comet wasn’t new: It was SW3, which broke up and became hundreds of times brighter than normal, he added.

“It was like cracking an egg,” he said. “All this dusty debris suddenly appeared.”

While our planet has already struck SW3’s dust particles, this will be the first time Earth’s orbit has encountered all the material that exploded in 1995.

No one is quite sure what caused SW3’s collapse, but NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have tracked the comet fragment for years. It was possible for the icy body to transit too close to both the hot sun and Jupiter’s strong gravity.

“Perhaps after disrupting its orbit countless times, the comet finally said, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore,’ and it broke into pieces,” Mr. Rao said.

When did we learn what causes meteor showers?

Humans have been detecting “shooting stars” for thousands of years. It is unknown when ancient skywatchers first associated them with a particular point in the sky. Mark Littman, author of “The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms,” ​​says some Native American traditions may demonstrate an early understanding of radians.

The Kiliwa, Indigenous people of Baja California, Mexico, for example, describe meteor showers as a type of fiery celestial urine from a constellation they call Xsmii.

Dr. “If you think of a meteor shower and, excuse me, if there’s spray spray, that means they’ve noticed that there’s a glow there,” Littman said. “This would be the earliest observation of a radiant we have.”

The earliest known written observation of a glow came from Islamic skywatchers who recorded a massive rain after the death of the conqueror Abu Ishaq Ibrahim II ibn Ahmad in 902 AD. They noted that meteors came from one spot while it was raining, Dr. said Litman.

Our modern understanding of meteor showers can be traced back to the late 18th century, when people recorded a large comet passing from the direction of the constellation Leo a year before a major meteor storm. Then, on November 12, 1833, the Leonid rain was so spectacular that thousands of shooting stars fell every minute.

Dr. “There were reports of people falling down while praying and rushing to church to repent of their sins,” Littman said.

Denison Olmsted, an astronomer in Connecticut, was woken that night by neighbors and went outside to see the storm. Olmsted wrote to a local newspaper and asked viewers to send him their own accounts, a request that was reprinted in newspapers around the country.

After collecting many responses and doing further research, Olmsted concluded that meteor showers originate from beyond our planet, contradicting Aristotle’s long-held belief that meteorites are exhalations from the Earth’s surface.

Dr. “He really should be considered the father of meteor science,” Littman said.