Alpha Capricornids is a

meteor shower A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate, or originate, from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's atmosphere at extre ...

that takes place as early as 7 July and continues until around 15 August. The meteor shower was discovered by Hungarian

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, g ...

Miklos von Konkoly-Thege in 1871. This shower has infrequent but relatively bright meteors, with some fireballs. Parent body is comet

169P/NEAT 169/NEAT is a periodic comet in the Solar System. It is the parent body of the alpha Capricornids meteor shower in Late July. 169/NEAT may be related to comet P/2003 T12 (SOHO). It comes to perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on 9 July 2022 ...

Peter Jenniskens Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens (born 2 August 1962, in Horst) is a Dutch-American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showe ...

and Jeremie Vaubaillon identified the parent body as asteroid 2002 EX12, which in the return of 2005 was found weakly active near

perihelion An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any ellip ...

. This object is now called comet

. According to Jenniskens and Vaubaillon, the meteor shower was created about 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, when about half of the parent body disintegrated and fell into dust. The dust cloud evolved into

Earth's orbit Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149.60 million km (92.96 million mi) in a counterclockwise direction as viewed from above the Northern Hemisphere. One complete orbit takes days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth ...

recently, causing a shower with peak rates of 2-5/h, sometimes having outbursts of bright flaring meteors with rates up to 5-9/h. The bulk of the dust will not be in Earth's path until the 24th century. The Alpha Capricornids are expected to become a major annual storm in 2220– 2420 A.D., one that will be "stronger than any current annual shower."

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External links

Interactive visualization of Alpha Capricornids meteor stream-4 magnitude Alpha Capricornid
shooting past Delphinus on July 17th, 2006. Sigma 20 mm f/1.8 {{Meteor showers Meteor showers July events August events