The sporadic tau Herculid meteor shower may appear this 2022, on the night of May 30 to 31with the possibility of a spectacular meteor shower being observed in the sky.
The culprit is comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, discovered in 1930 when it passed 9.2 million kilometers from Earth. However, this comet never became bright enough to be visible to the naked eye; it could only be glimpsed with good binoculars or a telescope.
And although it orbits the sun every 5.4 years, after 1930 it was gone for quite some time. In fact, between 1935 and 1974, 73P/SW3 went in and out eight times without being seen. It was not seen again until March 1979. He missed his next comeback, in January 1985, but picked it up again in early 1990.
Astronomers expected the comet to make another uneventful return in the fall of 1995. But in early October, the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams suddenly began receiving “numerous reports from observers around the world of independent discoveries” of a comet. to the naked eye, low in western evening twilight and sporting a 1 degree long dust tail. It was 73P/SW3, reports Space.com.
This was surprising because the comet was never closer to Earth in 1995 than 196 million km and should have been visible only with moderately large telescopes. Yet there it was, shining 6.5 magnitudes brighter than expected, 400 times brighter than expected. As for the cause of this tremendous outburst, observations at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile, revealed that its tiny core had fractured into four pieces.
The comet was still quite bright on its next visit in the fall of 2000, showing that two of the fragments detected in 1995 had returned, along with a new one, which probably broke off during the 1995 return.
In the spring of 2006, the disintegrating comet made its return appearance, initially showing at least eight remnants, and some of the fragments were forming their own subfragments.
On April 18, 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope recorded dozens of fragments. Between May 4 and 6, it was the turn of the Spitzer Space Telescope to photograph the comet; using his Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), he was able to observe 45 of the 58 cometary fragments. In all, 73P/SW3 eventually split into more than 68 fragments, and in its most recent appearance in March 2017 it showed signs of continuing to break apart and shed new pieces with each return through the inner solar system.
By the end of this month of May, It will be the first time that the Earth and the trail of debris from the comet ejected in 1995 cross paths from the fragmentation event. But you can’t see where the meteoroids have spread, so it’s hard to predict exactly how many Earth might encounter when we cross the comet’s path this month. It all depends on whether the debris has spread far enough ahead of the comet to interact with our planet. The final intensity of this meteor shower will depend on this factor.