MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Tatyana Sinitsyna) - The Earth will cross the Draconid meteor shower within a few days.
The encounter repeats every year in October's first ten days, with intensity varying on a 7-year cycle, which is now at its peak.
Our planet will enter the meteor swarm on October 8, to stay for the next two days among cosmic dust and tiny pebbles. In fact, a majority of meteors are not vagabond giants spelling apocalyptic disasters-each weighs from a tenth to a thousandth fraction of a gram.
Be that as it may, a sight of breathtaking beauty awaits us. Every night in good weather, we people of northern latitudes shall see a slow, reddish star shower near Draco, or the Dragon-a constellation shining above the North Pole.
Since times immemorial, falling stars have owed their impact on human imagination not to their beauty alone, but even more so, to their mystical power. Some make a wish as they see a falling star, others think this is a soul coming down to a newborn baby, and still others say it is a soul leaving the body. According to another old belief, stars are candles the Apostles light in heaven and Satan blows down.
The scientific view is quite different. Meteor showers are produced by comet disintegration. "A comet is bound together with ice or frozen carbonic acid. It evaporates as the comet approaches the Sun, while its solid mineral particles move on in a swarm along the orbit of their vanished parent comet. There are a great many such swarms on circumsolar orbits. The Draconids, which belong to the 15 largest, are remnants of the Giacobini-Zinner comet," Dr. Alexander Bagrov said to RIA Novosti. He is one of the leading experts at the Space Astrometric Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Astronomy Institute.
Meteoroids ionize the terrestrial atmosphere as they enter it to produce radiance. Though they travel parallel to each other, we have an impression of movement to all sides away from a center-hence the name of "shooting stars " or "falling stars". This illusory dispersion is due to the perspective effect. We observe it as we look at a railroad, whose parallel rails appear to come together in the distance. The illusory point where the October meteor shower paths meet is close to Draco. That is why it is known as the Draconids.
Flying specks of space dust attack the Earth as wasps. This is why they are known as "meteor swarm". They burn in the lower atmosphere never to reach the surface. We see the Draconids the instance they enter the upper air, at a 100-kilometer height. 60 kilometers is the closest distance to which they can get before burning, so we see them as a luminous shower.
Meteor showers are permanently monitored. "Their profound studies are only starting," Dr. Bagrov goes on. "A new stage of research began as soon as we obtained television technologies." Search is on for yet undiscovered showers. Another program serves the space effort. "We are taking stock of cosmic dust to forecast collisions. Not that the danger is great. 5-6 thousand kilometers is an average distance between particles, so collision probability is negligible. A mere five or six spacecraft have been badly damaged by meteors since the space era started," Bagrov says.
However, a tiny bullet kills a man and a beast, while space velocity makes a meteoroid of a gram or even smaller as powerful as a hand grenade, so we never can be too careful.
To see how the world is made is the goal of science. It has penetrated the depths of the Universe, and there are theories of what happened the first instances after the Big Bang, the prime mover of Creation-yet no one knows how the solar system was born. Meteor research promises an explanation.
