Meteor shower in 2019 could come with loads of surprises: Inside story
New Delhi : It is likely that the Earth will witness a massive meteor shower in the year 2019. A new calculation by Mark Boslough, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, shows that tree-fall pattern in Siberia is consistent with an asteroid coming from the same area in the sky as the Taurid meteor swarm. The Taurids meteor showers occur twice a year, in late June and late October or early November. Generally Beta Taurid shower takes place in the month of June. They strike during the day, when sunlight washes out the "shooting stars" that are visible during the nighttime meteor shower later in the year.
On June 30, 1908, an object measuring the size of an apartment building came hurtling out of the sky and exploded in the atmosphere above Siberia. Named as Tunguska event, it flattened trees for 800 square miles. It occurred in one of the least-populated places in Asia, and luckily no one was killed or injured. This airburst stands as the most powerful impact event in recorded human history, and it remains enigmatic, as scientists don't know the origin of the object or whether it was an asteroid or a comet.
Boslough and physicist Peter Brown of Western University in London, Ontario, gave a presentation at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in Washington this month in which they called for a special observation campaign this June to search for Tunguska-class or larger objects embedded in the Taurids.
It is possible that 2019 could be a year after 1975, when seismometers left on the moon by Apollo astronauts recorded a spike in impacts during the Taurid swarm.
"If the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream . . . then the last week of June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near misses," their AGU presentation stated.
"While we are not predicting another Tunguska airburst, an enhanced population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in the Beta Taurids would increase the probability of another such event on or near next year's Tunguska anniversary," they concluded.
Experts say that the space is big and it is easy to miss the Earth than to hit it. And, it happened in 2013 when an object smaller than the Tunguska impactor slammed into the atmosphere in Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk, creating a fireball and a shock wave that shattered windows and injured more than 1,000 people.
Till date, the number of people killed by asteroid impacts is zero.
"This is not something that should be keeping you up at night," Brown said.
Boslough puts the asteroid impact hazard in perspective: "It's one of those very low-probability but potentially high-consequence-type risks, which is hard to quantity and hard to talk about. The probability of a lot of people dying from an asteroid impact is super, super low, but it's not zero." He adds, "There are so many other hazards that are greater risk."
