Tonight, the Leonid meteor shower will have its biggest night, and it is called the "King of Meteor Showers."According to the Beijing Planetarium, mid-November every year is the best time to watch the Leonid meteor shower.This year's maximum will be from the night of the 17th to the early morning of the 18th, which means that tonight, we are likely to see the most meteors in this Leonid meteor shower.
The Leonid meteor shower has attracted much attention from astronomy enthusiasts because of its past performance.
As early as 1833, it left an astonishing record of the largest zenith flow of 35,000 meteors in North America. It was also this meteor shower that greatly promoted the development of modern astronomy.
More than 100 years later, in 1966, the record for the Leonid meteor shower was set again. The peak flow in Arizona and other places in the United States was estimated to reach 100,000 meteors per hour. It was called "the greatest meteor shower on record" by the West.
Its most recent outburst occurred in 2001. Many places around the world, including China, witnessed the celestial spectacle of approximately 4,000 meteors streaking across the night sky per hour.
A senior engineer at the Beijing Planetarium said bluntly: "Back then, you could watch it all night long. Whenever you wanted to watch it, there would always be a shooting star falling from the sky."
In addition to the zenith flow that puts other meteor showers in the dust, the Leonid meteor shower is also unparalleled in speed and brightness.
When the Earth's orbit intersects the orbit of Comet Tempel-Tuttle,Some dust particles break into the earth's atmosphere at a relative speed of up to 71 kilometers per second, which is more than twice the muzzle velocity of a bullet.
Such high speeds often produce more bolides, the brightest of which are even brighter than Venus, the brightest planet in people's eyes.
In addition, blue-green meteors often appear in the Leonid meteor shower. This is a specific light produced when the metal elements in the meteoroid burn at high speed, which is very rare in other meteor showers.