Taurids

With the new moon's velvety dark skies on the 11th of September, it's an excellent time to gaze up at one of the longest active meteor showers of the year.

The southern Taurids can be spotted in the northeastern sky between the Seven Sisters constellation and Taurus.

Created when Earth passes through the large dust and gas streams left behind by the comet Enka, these fireballs may be sporadic and low in number, but the ones you see will be very bright.

Later in the month, the 23rd of September brings the autumn equinox, when the lengths of day and night are nearly equal around the world.

And I think there's enough evidence.

I think there's there's plenty of evidence out there to suggest that, you know, the Earth crossed paths with a very active section of the Taurid meteor stream.

And, you know, it may not have been one big impact, which would have been required to create these Carolina Bays.

But, you know, it was probably a really active shooting star event where we had bolides blowing up, kind of like the Chelyabinsk event and Tunguska.

The ultra-terrestrial hypothesis is so interesting, this idea that there was maybe a cataclysm.

I mean, maybe something caused the Ice Age, and that's what those two guys think, is that maybe there was a comet, um, airburst in the Taurid meteor stream, uh, which occurs twice a year every year.

Mm.

Uh, and this occurred, uh, literally, actually, if you look at when, um, you know, the, the legend of Atlantis was told, it was, like, 600 BC, and it was, like, 9,000 r- years earlier-

Jupiter's pull slowly herding the biggest fragments into a tighter pack.

that drifts through the stream the torrid resonant swarm they called it and the implication the quiet cold implication under all of it is that catastrophe from the sky might not be an accident it might be an appointment scheduled not by any one not by anything with intention just by the blind arithmetic of orbits the same arithmetic that brings the persides back every august a clock made of gravel ticking on a cycle of thousands of years and we only find out what time it is when we pass through the dense part again there's one more thread worth pulling here gently because it shows you how alive this argument still is some people who take the taurids seriously have looked at the great mystery blast of the twentieth century tunguska in nineteen o eight when something exploded in the air over remote Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb and flattened 800 square miles of forest without leaving a proper crater, and they've noticed that it happened at the end of June.

In summer, during the daytime Taurids, the very stretch when Earth is crossing the hidden half of the stream, and they've wondered aloud whether Tunguska was a Taurid, a piece of the old broken giant arriving right on cue.

It's a genuinely intriguing thought.

It is also, I have to be honest with you, far from proven.

Um, we've found quite a few of these over the years now in various circumstances.

My favorite really is the Taurid stream of debris.

We get the Taurid meteor shower every year from about September to December.

We've got the Northern and Southern Taurids.

We also get a daytime meteor shower in June called the Beta Taurids.

Result is we spend about four months of every 12 passing through this enormous broad swath of debris, where on any given night when the meteor shower's active, even at its peak, you'll only see four or five meteors an hour.

The debris is very spread out.

Hmm.

These sounds are loud, unmistakable, and sometimes powerful enough to shake buildings.

The Taurid Complex: a hidden danger.

Most meteor showers pose no danger to Earth.

The particles are tiny, burning up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.

But one stream deserves special attention.

The Taurid Complex is a broad, diffuse stream of debris that Earth encounters twice a year, in late June and again in November.

Unlike most streams, which are dominated by dust, the Taurids contain larger objects, including boulders and possibly even small asteroids.

The parent body of the Taurids is Comet Encke, a short-period comet with an orbital period of just over three years.