Through Timothee L’Angevin
published on
Look up and admire the sky. A rain of shooting stars is expected in this month of April 2022, with an expected peak on Friday 22. These are the Lyridena meteor shower whose radiant resides? in the constellation Lyra.
20 per hour
You don’t need binoculars or telescopes to observe this show, just your eyes are enough, says news.fr Gilles Dawidowicz, the general secretary of the SAF (Astronomical Society of France). “You’ll have to be far from the light pollution of the cities and look pretty low on the horizon, heading north, northeast. †
The weather must also be good. Cloudy spells are expected towards the end of the week, but a few clouds could spoil the party.
If we can never predict the exact number of celestial bodies that will illuminate the sky, the Lyrids generally produce: twenty shooting stars an hour. By comparison, during the Perseids, in August, you can see as many as 100 per hour.
Dust from a comet
But where do these meteors come from? In the case of the Lyrids, they come from comet C/1861 G1, discovered by American amateur astronomer Albert Thatcher in 1861 (hence the name).
The comet consists of crystals of ice, earth, carbonaceous matter… when it comes close to the sun, under the influence of heat and radiation, it outgass. The material it is made of sublimates (transition from the solid state to the gaseous state without going through the liquid state, editors note). This is what produces the famous tail that we know so well, which can reach several tens of millions of kilometers.
So the meteorite swarms are the dust that this tail leaves behind. When the Earth meets their orbit, at the same time every year, they penetrate the upper atmosphere at several tens of kilometers per second. Under the influence of friction, they disintegrate and leave a luminous trail for a few seconds. This is what creates the shooting star.
The next swarm, the Eta Aquarids, is planned for early May†
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