Celebrate the New Year Cosmically
by Susan Leem, associate producer
The Quadrantids are coming! The Quadrantids are coming!
This meteor shower is named after a constellation that no longer exists, but you can get a peek of these gorgeous comets streaking across the sky in the new year on the early morning of January 4th in North America.
According to NASA, the fragments you see come from an asteroid, which could be a piece of a comet that broke up centuries ago. They will “enter our atmosphere at 90,000 mph, burning up 50 miles above Earth’s surface.”
It’s the first major meteor shower of the new year. And one of the strongest of the year if conditions are right.
Photo by Ed Sweeney/Flickr, CC BY 2.0
