Mega Taurid swarm.

[moonomaly]

Hi i hope all are well in these challenging times.

I read a few years ago about some kind of mega or super Taurid swarm, does anyone know when Earth will be in the thick of that ?

 

Thanks.

 

[Leo S]

Unfortunately you are a little late to the party this year.  The Taurid swarm has a 7 year cycle of enhanced activity. The previous outburst year was 2015, and this year the Swarm was closest to Earth around the start of November (according to modelling). The last couple of weeks in particular has been quite busy for bright events (my cameras were catching an average of two borderline fireballs every night for a while, given a reasonably clear night), but the last two nights there seems to have been a sharp decline in bright Taurids, especially last night. That said, there should still be the occasional fireball about for a week or two at the very least - there may even be a slight uptick in rates, so it's still worth observing if you have reasonably clear skies.

There is also a 3 year cycle, so 2025 could be good too, but 2032 looks to be the date to circle in the diary. Of course, we are still learning about the Taurid swarm, and I suspect we may yet discover some potential outbursts before then - it's turning out to be significantly more complex than just the two branches (southern and northern) we currently concentrate on.

[moonomaly]

Thanks Leo, interesting and helpful answer

[Leo S]

18 hours ago, moonomaly said:

Thanks Leo, interesting and helpful answer

You're very welcome.

If you're into reading papers, there are more in the news section of meteornews.net. Quite a few papers on Taurids posted over the last couple of years there.

[Leo S]

By the way, if anyone is having trouble getting past the first page of news with the above link, try this link instead, and then try pressing buttons to get to other pages:

https://www.meteornews.net/category/news/page/3/

Not sure if it's just me, but it took a bit of faffing about to get to the earlier news/pages.

Also, it's worth going back further than two years if you are looking for Taurid related reading. The Taurids has been one of the hottest topics in recent years for meteor researchers, so there have been many papers. Not really surprising as there is strong evidence that it potentially has the capacity for multiple significant impacts (on the order of Tunguska or Cehelyabinsk - potential "city killers"), and there is a lot of focus right now on finding these potentially hazardous objects (PHOs).