The FINANCIAL — The annual Geminid meteor shower, visible this year from Dec. 6-18, reached its peak on the night of Dec. 13-14. According to BBC, the shower was especially easy to see this year because it is nearly the new Moon, meaning there was less moonlight to obscure it.
The meteors could be seen streaking across the night sky from 2000 GMT; peaking around 2200, the same source reports.. Robert Massey, of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, said about 100 meteors an hour made it a "nice sight". In August people in the UK were treated to the sight of the Perseid meteor shower. However, light from the last quarter Moon interfered with viewing.
According to National Geographic, the Geminids are slow meteors that create beautiful long arcs across the sky—many lasting a second or two.
The Geminid shower was first spotted in the early 1860s, and it has been growing stronger ever since. The meteors are pieces of debris from a mysterious object called the 3200 Phaethon, believed to be an extinct comet, Findingdulcinea.com informs. NASA explains, “Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini. … Jupiter's gravity has been acting on Phaethon's debris stream, causing it to shift more and more toward Earth's orbit. Each December brings a deeper plunge into the debris stream.”
Other meteor showers come from material shed by melting comets—which are massive chunks of dirty ice and rock—as they pass close to the sun, National Geographic reports. But no one knows for sure whether the Geminids' parent object, first identified in 1983, is an asteroid or the core of an ancient comet that simply sputtered out. Recent observations of Phaethon, though, suggest it's a nearly dormant comet, and the Geminids' parent is now officially classified as such by NASA.
The research revealed that Phaethon is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun, according to NASA, the same source wrote. The shooting stars' rocky, hard exterior—as well as the fact that they, unprotected by ice, get baked by the sun—may help explain why Geminids are slower and last longer in the sky than other shooting stars, said Peter Brown, a meteor expert at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. "They have the ability to penetrate deeper into Earth's atmosphere," Brown said, "and burn up at much lower altitudes than meteors associated with the Perseids and Leonids."
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