By Doyle Rice.
Sky watchers could be in for a memorable spectacle Monday night and early Tuesday morning as the Earth passes through debris from a disintegrating comet, leading to a potential meteor shower with thousands of shooting stars per hour.
The meteor shower, known as the tau Herculids, could be spectacular, or it could be a total dud, astronomers said.
“This is going to be an all or nothing event,” NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke said in a statement. If it does reach thousands of meteors per hour, it would be a “meteor storm,” as opposed to a shower.
There is “a small chance of something extraordinary – perhaps one of the most dramatic meteor displays since the spectacular Leonid meteor showers of more than 20 years ago,” said Joe Rao of Space.com.
Maximum activity is expected around 1 a.m. EDT Tuesday, the Space Weather Archive blog said.
The comet is known as 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3), named after the two German astronomers who discovered it in 1930. The comet is breaking into dozens of pieces as it orbits the sun, which it does every 5.4 years, NASA said.
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