Sky watchers may have the chance to witness a never-before-seen meteor shower as our planet moves through streams of dust left behind by a comet passing our cosmic neighborhood two centuries ago, a NASA scientist says.
The Camelopardalid shower will make its initial appearance during the night and morning of May 23 to May 24, Bill Cooke, who heads the space agency's Meteoroid Environment Office, says.
The office runs an arrangement of automated meteor observatories, but Cooke says he'll be outdoors from the Huntsville, Alabama office watching for this shower on his own.
"There could be a new meteor shower, and I want to see it with my own eyes," he says. "Some forecasters have predicted more than 200 meteors per hour."
The shower will be the result of dust shed by Comet 209P/LINEAR, a periodic comet detected in 2004 as part of the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project, a collaborative effort of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force and NASA.
The comet left the dust streams behind mainly in the 1800s during previous trips through the inner solar system.
The intensity of the meteor shower will depend on the activity level of the comet back then, which nobody is sure of, Cooke says.
"We have no idea what the comet was doing in the 1800s," he says. Because of that uncertainty, he adds, "there could be a great meteor shower -- or a complete dud."
The Earth will be intersecting all of the comet's dust trails left behind from 1803 to 1924, so there is the possibility of a storm of several hundred meteors an hour, astronomers say.
Comet 209P/LINEAR, a rather dim comet, orbits the sun once every 5 years.
Viewing should be best between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. EDT early on the 24th, astronomers say.
Meteor showers take the name of the constellation out of which they appear to radiate, in this case the Camelopardalis (giraffe) constellation.
Skywatchers will have little trouble finding the constellation, located just to the right and slightly below the Big Dipper, astronomers say.
After the upcoming cosmic lightshow it's not sure if, or even when, the Earth will pass through this particular comet's dust trail again, they say.
"It's a one night thing," Cooke says.
