Every three minutes a comet burns up in Earth orbit – making August a highlight for stargazers!
Since mid-July there have been more and more falling stars in the night sky. These are the so-called “Delta Aquariids”. Its namesake is close to the star “Delta Aquarii” in Aquarius. Most of these meteors fell on July 30th – and gave the starting signal for a great summer sniff.
Prof. Thomas W. Kraupe, director of the Hamburg Planetarium, explains to BILD: “Although the moon with its light unfortunately makes itself noticeable towards the end of July – when the nights get a little longer and darker again – the mild summer nights offer us one pleasant look into the depths of the sky. So we see a few shooting stars now and then even in the moonlight. “
The Delta Aquariids are just the beginning: Since August, even more meteors have been whizzing across the sky.
“This moderate shower of falling stars is only the ‘warm-up’ for the upcoming summer fireworks,” explains Prof. Kraupe. “Because at the moment our earth is approaching the dust trail of the comet Swift-Tuttle, the cause of the ‘Perseids’.”
As the name suggests, the Perseid meteors of this river flow from the constellation Perseus. The maximum is forecast for the evening hours on the 12th.
The Perseids are fast falling stars that plunge into the earth’s atmosphere at 60 kilometers per second. The fall rate is a hundred meteors per hour. Since a single person can only see a fifth of the sky at a time, on average one only sees a Perseid every three minutes.
“These falling stars are known as ‘Perseids’ because the dust particles from the line of sight of the constellation Perseus – not far from the striking ‘Heaven-Ws’ – patter and burn up on the protective atmosphere of the earth”, says Prof. Kraupe.
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