Shortly after the new year arrives, a light show can be observed in the night sky. The Quadrantids, one of the three strongest meteor showers of the year, come to visit Earth.
The first meteors of the shower have already arrived, but their peak is still ahead, it will occur on the night of Wednesday January 4, more precisely at 4:40.
At that time, most of the meteoroids will enter the atmosphere. The place from which the bright (radiant) meteors will fly out is in the constellation Shepherd – formerly the constellation Wall Quadrant. It will be low above the northern horizon at first, but then it will rise and you will see the meteors better.
An image of a Quadrantids meteor, showing that these phenomena can be colored. The colors in meteors come from ionized elements released during their decay. The blue-green comes from magnesium, the nickel glows green, and the red usually comes from atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen. The image shows a clear windblown ionization trail. | source: profmedia
The conditions for viewing this time will be disturbed by the Moon. It will be three days before the full moon on Wednesday night.
Origin unclear
The moon, as the site of the Astronomical Institute points out Star, sets on Wednesday around five in the morning, ie the time when the maximum of the Quadrantids should occur, promising up to one hundred meteors per hour. Fortunately, the constellation Shepherd is on the opposite side, to the east.
However, right after the moon sets, it begins to rise in about an hour. You will therefore have only a few tens of minutes to observe the Quadrantids undisturbed. But you’ll need some luck with a cloudless sky for that.
Meteoroid it is usually a fragment of a comet (a body of ice and dust that orbits a star) or an asteroid (asteroid) that turns into meteor – a bright light that crosses the sky. Mostly it burns, sometimes it disintegrates and its fragments fall to the Earth like meteorites. Only in rare cases does it escape the Earth’s gravity.
The maximum quadrantid meteor shower in Slovakia’s Oravská Lesná in 2020. You can also see the meteors in “color” in this image. | source: Facebook/Petr Horálek
You can observe watch faces for the rest of the week. However, their intensity will quickly decrease.
The swarm’s maternal body is not yet clear. At first, astronomers thought it was comet 96P Machholz, which orbits the Sun once every five years.
However, in December 2003, a meteoroid expert from the American agency NASA, Peter Jenniskens, put forward a hypothesis that the shower came from an asteroid with catalog number 196 256. However, we are not sure of the origin of the shower. .
Ancient 17th century astronomical chart showing the constellation of Shepherd, from which the Quadrantids arise. In the painting, drawn on the basis of the observations of the astronomer Johannes Hevelius in the 17th century, the Quadratids are seen as a shepherd holding a spear, a scythe and two dogs. The constellation Shepherd (Bootes in Latin) is located in the northern sky and was one of the 48 constellations already described by the astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century. Today it is among the 88 constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union. | source: profmedia
The flashes of light you see in the sky when looking at the Quadrantids are energy radiated from gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Meteors transfer kinetic energy to gas atoms, which eliminate it in the form of photons, i.e. light carriers. Meteors themselves burn by rubbing against air molecules.
Slow and fleeting
The Quadrantid swarm’s path intersects the Earth at an almost perpendicular angle, resulting in a short duration of the swarm and its sharp peak lasting only a few hours.
Quadrantids are also known to be among the slowest swarms. They enter the earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 41 kilometers per second.
They come back every year, and yet they can be called a fleeting phenomenon. Jupiter pushes them out of the orbit of our planet with its gravitational influence, so that in less than a thousand years the Quadrantids will be just a memory for mankind.
