Weather

How you can hear the Geminid meteor shower tonight

The Geminid meteor shower is underway, peaking Thursday night into Friday morning. Mostly cloudy skies tonight will make seeing the meteors difficult, but you can still hear them from inside your warm home.

Posted Updated
Geminids
By
Tony Rice
, WRAL contributor/NASA Ambassador

The Geminid meteor shower is underway, peaking Thursday night into Friday morning. Mostly cloudy skies tonight will make seeing the meteors difficult, but you can still hear them from inside your warm home.

The Geminids are a little different from other meteor showers. While all meteor showers are created as Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left behind by near Earth objects such as comets and asteroids, most meteor showers are the product of the remnants of comets. The Geminids are created by asteroid 3200 Phaethon as recently as last December, which could create a more dazzling show.

Comets and asteroids have a lot in common -- comets can be described as dirty ice balls and asteroids as icy dirt balls, but asteroid dust can be quite a bit denser than what many comets leave behind. This makes for slower meteors which leave persistent trains.

Their best chance to see (or hear) meteors begins around 10:30 p.m. local time Thursday as the moon sets leaving a darker sky. Chances improve throughout the night, both as the radiant point, just above the twin bright stars of the constellation gemini rise to their highest point around 2 a.m.

As Earth moves through that stream, that dust and debris excites air molecules in the upper atmosphere, leaving behind a trail of ionized, highly -harged plasma lasting seconds to minutes. These trails are a few feet in width but can be miles long -- 50 miles up. Exceptionally bright meteors can produce an audible sound, but you can hear others through radio signals briefly bounced off these trails like light off a mirror.

You can watch (and listen) for radio waves bounced off Geminids at livemeteors.com. This displays meteor activity seen from an antenna in Washington D.C., pointed toward a television station over the horizon,1200 miles away in Timmins, Ontario, Canada. Activity tends to increase after sunset as we turn into 3200 Phaethon's dust stream and is best from midnight to about 6 a.m.

More On This

 Credits 

Copyright 2024 by Capitol Broadcasting Company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.