The maximum phase of the Leonid meteor shower will be observed in the sky tonight. It will be possible to observe 12-15 meteors in one hour. Levon Azizyan, director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Monitoring SNCO, wrote about this on his Facebook page.
“Every year, between November 8 and 22, the Leonid meteor shower is observed, with slight fluctuations in the maximum phase. The center of the Leonid meteor shower, which in astronomy is called the radiant of the meteor shower, is located in the direction of the constellation Leo, from where the name of this shower originated.
The maximum phase of the Leonid meteor shower will be observed in the sky tonight, and it will be possible to observe 12-15 meteors in one hour. Meteor showers occur when the Earth, moving in its orbit around the Sun, encounters a group of meteorites, usually produced by comets, and the latter, penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed (several tens or hundreds of thousands of km/h), burn up and leave traces resembling “shooting stars”. Leonids have a reasonably high speed, averaging 72 km/s, and leave greenish trails in the sky. Their size can reach 9 mm, and their mass can be as high as 85 grams.
The annual Leonid meteor shower is caused by the Earth passing through the fragments left by the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, discovered in 1866. Although the Leonids are not very intense in normal years, every 33.25 years, when the Earth passes through the center of a meteor shower, there is a sharp increase in the number of meteors. At that time, the Leonids are the most abundant meteor shower, with more than 1,000 (sometimes up to 3,000) meteors per hour.
