onehundredmiles

It’s that time of year again. The Perseids reach their peak and everyone goes meteor shower crazy.
I will admit, spotting a meteorite just as it ‘flashes’ is a pretty spectacular event and it never gets old. I was just hanging out of my bedroom window trying to spot a few myself.
Reaching a peak at around 22:20pm (on the 12th August) and then again at around 3:20am, with just over 1 meteor per minute, it’s pretty easy to find a few just by staring at the constellation Perseus.
I find it pretty fascinating where they come from.

Everyone has heard of comets, right?
Well, comets orbit the Sun, and in their wake they leave a trail of ice and rock. As Earth continues on its own orbit, it intercepts some of these trails at certain points of the year. The meteorite trails you see in the sky are formed when the icy part of the trail melts and the rocks burn up as they enter the atmosphere.
Now, the Perseids shower originates from the debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. Not a very well known comet, but nevertheless it has a funny name…

A more famous comet associated with a popular meteor shower is Halley’s comet. This gives rise to the Orionid meteor shower, so called because the meteors radiate from the constellation Orion. This shower occurs around mid October, and is a bit dimmer than the Perseid shower, but is so much cooler because it’s Halley’s comet.
Even better than that, however, are the Taurids.
Caused by a lesser known comet, comet Encke, they also produce a relatively dim shower. However it occurs close to Hallowe’en, which earns it some cool points. The debris stream of the comet has also been disrupted by the gravity of larger planets, like Jupiter, into two distinct streams, which can be seen as the Northern Taurids and Southern Taurids.
Even bettter than that, though, is the possible claim the Taurids can make.
They may be the cause of the Star of Bethlehem.
Now, a quick disclaimer. This doesn’t have to assume that the Christian religion is correct, or that a ‘God’ even exists. Just that Jesus Christ was born around the time we all know…

With that out of the way, the Taurids have a periodicity. This means that it has a peak in activity roughly every 3000 years. Astronomers have estimated that the next peak in activity will occur around 3000AD. Which makes the previous peak around 0AD. Jesus’ Birthday.
This is a kind of nice thought, and it has Astronomical credability, although a more likely scenario would be the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that also occured at that time. That event can also be placed at that time with a bit more accuracy.
The conjunction of two planets means that they ‘overlap’ each other on the sky. Now, they may not exactly overlap, and the light from the planets will add together to make a particularly bright point of light. If this happened around that time, it would have definately seemed like a ‘divine message’, it’s not everyday that you see a bright light appear in the sky three times in a row…

But then, this is all moot as we then have to assume that three ‘wise’ men would follow a strange bright star on a whim and that it would lead them to a newborn child in a barn…

Make of the mythology what you will, but the astronomy stands up