Heavy rain Geminids exceeds forecasts … – RTVE

RTVE.es

The meteor known as the Geminids, which peaked in the early hours of Sunday, exceeded the expectations of astronomers, since counted about 400 meteors per hour from the Observatorio del Teide.

This was revealed in a note the observation team from the Institute of Astrophysics de Canarias (IAC), the first data collected indicate a extraordinary activity that could have doubled the expected calculations.

IAC astronomers now research the causes for the rain of meteros was so intense .

Intense ‘storm’ meteor

After midnight clouds They covered the area of ​​the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife, were removed to make thoroughly clear skies e ntonces, started the ‘rain’.

Multiple cameras deployed for imaging large field and oriented Orion Nebula allowed astronomers to assess the magnitude of the event. In about four hours, seven strokes crossed as small as the Orion Nebula field.

_{The Geminids 2014 and the Orion Nebula. Photo: M. Serra-Ricart & amp; J. C. Married IAC.}

Students of the Route of Stars project helped the fieldwork counting meteors and height calculation meteors per parallax . They now have to confirm with other C entros international astronomical research results.

However, according to the IAC, the data for the morning of 14 show a higher than forecasts from the International Meteor Organization, IMO, we predicted would fall an average of one every two minutes meteor activity.

What is a rain ‘shooting stars’

The colloquially called ‘shooting stars’ are actually small dust particles of different sizes , some smaller than grains of sand left by the kites along their orbits around the sun. They disintegrate rapidly upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere and create light trails known receiving the scientific name of meteors.

This is true for most rainfall, but not for the Geminids: there is no match comet trajectory cloud ‘rubble ‘ .

The origin of the Geminids was a mystery until the solar probes Stereo, NASA confirmed the appearance of a small tail on the asteroid 3200 Phaethon -in its closest approach to the Sun or perihelio- single object moving in the same orbit as the cloud causing Geminid meteoroids.

From that time, 3200 Phaethon is known as ‘rock comet’. This is an asteroid that comes close to the Sun and enables a tail surface disruption due to overheating forms (temperatures of 1000 K are reached) .

In the case of Phaethon, the perihelion is only 21 million kilometers -the minimum distance of Mercury from the Sun is 46 million miles -.