Meteors and Meteorites

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    Leonids Meteor Shower: When and How to Watch Its Peak

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    The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot.Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with your naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one of them.The latest observable meteor shower will be the Leonids, which have been active since at least Nov. 6 and are forecast to continue through Nov. 30. They reach their peak Nov. 16 to 17, or Saturday night into Sunday morning.Meteors from the Leonids can be spotted in the constellation Leo, and they will be visible from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The Leonids produce some of the fastest meteors each year, at 44 miles per second, with bright, long tails. But this year, spotting them may be difficult during the peak because of the nearly full moon.To get a hint at when to watch, you can use a meter that relies on data from the Global Meteor Network showing when real-time fireball activity levels increase in the coming days.Where meteor showers come fromThere is a chance you might see a meteor on any given night, but you are most likely to catch one during a shower. Meteor showers are caused by Earth passing through the rubble trailing a comet or asteroid as it swings around the sun. This debris, which can be as small as a grain of sand, leaves behind a glowing stream of light as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Small Meteor Caused Awe as It Streaked Across Manhattan

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      It had already been a weird few weeks in New York. Then a fireball streaked across the sky.New Yorkers have lived through their fair share of unusual events recently. There was an earthquake, an eclipse and the criminal trial of a former United States president, all against the backdrop of nail-biting national political crises and the hottest year on record.On Tuesday, the city added what seemed like a cosmic freak occurrence to the list: a meteor that had traveled millions of miles through deep space entered the atmosphere, passed above the Statue of Liberty, zoomed over the tourist boats of New York Harbor streaked over the Midtown Manhattan skyline, and exploded very, very high over the region.In a chaotic week, many New Yorkers did not seem to notice. Or, if they did hear a strange noise, they did what New Yorkers often do, especially when in Midtown Manhattan. They minded their own business.“I heard it, yes I did indeed,” Pat Battle, an anchor on the local NBC News broadcast, told viewers on Tuesday, with wonder in her voice. “But I never thought to look up.”The arrival and swift demise of a meteor above Midtown, the city’s noisiest and most chaotic precinct, attracted little attention there on Tuesday. But some residents in the other boroughs and New Jersey complained of a loud boom late on Tuesday morning, or said they saw a fireball streak through the sky.Ashleigh Holmes, a spokeswoman for New York City Emergency Management, referred questions about the meteor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Came From Outer Space. Now, They’re Going Into Hiding.

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      Rising temperatures in Antarctica are making meteorites sink out of view before researchers can collect them.If you’re looking for meteorites, here’s a tip: Go south. All the way south. And do it soon.In some parts of Antarctica, there’s a good chance that what looks like a regular old rock could actually be a chunk of an asteroid, the moon, or even Mars. Roughly 60 percent of all known meteorites have been collected there.But scientific sleuthing for such extraterrestrial material, which can shed light on how the solar system formed billions of years ago, will probably get more difficult in Antarctica in the coming decades. That’s because, as temperatures rise, thousands of meteorites will sink into the continent’s ice and disappear from sight every year, according to a new study published on Monday.Antarctica’s meteorite largess isn’t because more extraterrestrial stuff is falling there, Cari Corrigan, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution and a curator of the National Museum of Natural History’s meteorite collection, said.Rather, meteorites simply tend to be more visible on the Antarctic ice sheet than they would be, say, in your backyard. “Your eye can pick out a dark rock on a white surface super easily,” said Dr. Corrigan, who was not involved in the new research.The continent also has places known as blue-ice areas, that are particularly good for finding meteorites. These regions are often near geographic obstructions like mountains, where layers of ice tend to pile up and strong winds continuously erode the surface. Those conditions are ideal for concentrating, and revealing, meteorites that have fallen over millenniums.But warming temperatures could send many meteorites out of sight. In recent years, researchers have spotted specimens in Antarctica that have been partially encrusted in ice rather than sitting exposed on the surface.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More