November’s Taurid meteor shower lights up sky with bright fireballs

By Taylor Nicioli, CNN

Never mind that Halloween is over because “Halloween fireballs,” as NASA calls them, can still be seen blazing bright in the night sky over the next few weeks, thanks to the Southern Taurids meteor shower.

The shower’s estimated peak is on Saturday, Nov. 5, but it can be seen throughout the next week, according to EarthSky, and the Taurids are famous for producing the most and brightest fireballs — meteors that can appear brighter than the planet Venus.

This year’s shower is expected to include an increased number of fireballs, otherwise known as a Taurid swarm. The Southern Taurids usually only feature about five meteors an hour surrounding its peak, the point where Earth is closest to the center of the stream of debris. But every seven years, Jupiter’s gravity pulls on the meteor stream and causes a spike in their numbers.

“With the normal rate for fireballs, someone would have to sit outside for 20 hours straight to see one,” said Robert Lunsford, fireball report coordinator for the American Meteor Society. “With the Taurids, (that time) can be reduced quite a bit, maybe down to five hours. And if you’re really lucky, you could just step outside and within a few minutes see one. When they appear is totally unpredictable.”

<p>A bright fireball is seen above Brkini, Slovenia, on Nov. 12, 2015, during a Taurid swarm.</p>

Marko Korosec/Solent News/Shutterstock

A bright fireball is seen above Brkini, Slovenia, on Nov. 12, 2015, during a Taurid swarm.

The Taurids are the result of a breakup of a very large comet around 20,000 years ago. Among other debris, that breakup created Comet Encke, which has an orbit around the sun of a little more than three years, the shortest of any major comet in our solar system. With every pass of Earth in its short orbit, it leaves a trail of debris behind. This trail includes the Southern Taurids, which are a cluster so large it takes our planet several weeks to pass through.

Fireballs from the Taurids are meteors larger than a meter across, and they shine exceptionally bright, according to NASA. They move slow because they strike the Earth’s atmosphere at a perpendicular angle, so they can be seen moving across the sky for a few seconds, versus the millisecond of visibility most meteors yield. The brighter and longer-lasting meteors can be seen fragmenting and falling apart as they travel through the sky, according to Lunsford. Oftentimes, the fireballs are colorful, appearing red, orange or yellow.

“It would be like a shooting star,” said Mike Hankey, the American Meteor Society’s operations manager and creator of its fireball tracking program. “But instead of lasting a half of a second, it might last for three or four seconds, and instead of just being as bright as a star, it might be as bright as the moon — sometimes even brighter.”

This year the meteor society has already recorded an above-average increase in fireballs while NASA has photographed fireballs that appear to be even brighter than the moon in the night sky.

The best time to go out and spot a fireball will be at 2 a.m. local time throughout the next week, according to Lunsford. As the moon approaches its full moon stage set for Nov. 8, its brightness will start to disrupt the chances of fainter meteors being seen, but fireballs, due to their size and brightness, can be seen anywhere in the world, at any time during the night.

After the Southern Taurids, the Northern Taurid meteor showers are expected to peak around Nov. 12.

In July the “Buck moon” lit up the sky around the world:

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