On Monday night and early Tuesday morning, Earth will pass through the debris trail of a shattered comet. A new meteor shower may form as a result.
Night skywatchers in North America have the best chance of seeing the tau Herculid shower, with NASA recommending looking up around 1 a.m. on the East Coast and 10 p.m. on the West Coast. There will be no moonlight to conceal the meteors because the moon is young.
The comet was spotted in 1930 by German observers Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Arthur Wachman as 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, or SW3. It wasn’t seen again until the late 1970s, and the comet split into multiple fragments in the 1990s, according to NASA.
SW3 was roughly 70 pieces when it passed Earth again in 2006, and it has continued to disintegrate since then, according to the announcement.
According to NASA, measurements from the Spitzer Space Telescope published in 2009 revealed that certain fragments are traveling rapidly enough to be visible, which has piqued the interest of space experts.
Each year, there are about 30 meteor showers observable with the naked eye, which occur when the Earth passes through the debris trail left by a comet or asteroid.
Some meteor showers have been observed for millennia. According to NASA, the Perseid meteor shower, which happens every year in August, was originally noticed and recorded by Chinese astronomers over 2,000 years ago. New meteor showers like this one, if they occur, are extremely unusual.
