Meteor shower to take place on May 23

Tuesday’s Planetarium show, titled “Unstable Stars,” advised viewers on the meteor shower expected to happen May 23-24 from roughly 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., and the explosions of stars throughout the galaxies.

According to Pat Hanrahan, Planetarium director, we should be able to find the meteor shower in the night sky originating just next to the handle of the Little Dipper, close to the North Star.

The shower is expected to begin late Friday, May 23, at 10:40 p.m. and continue until 1:40 a.m. Saturday.

“As always, you will be able to see it more clearly outside the city limits, but I would suggest looking up if you find yourself still in the city,” said Hanrahan.

Like usual, the Planetarium show started off with a slideshow,  this one explaining in detail “Unstable Stars.” As he began, Hanrahan warned viewers that there was “going to be a lot of doom and gloom in tonight’s show.”

He lived up to his word with topics ranging from Red Giants, stars that are about to go supernova and explode any moment, to variable stars that emit different levels of light, essentially killing the Earth’s ozone.

Betelgeuse, the top left star of the constellation Orion, and Eta Carinae, a southern sky star, are Red Giants that could go supernova any day. Hanrahan said, “They could explode tonight, or it might take a million years. We don’t know.”

Still, Hanrahan said stars that explode are fairly rare, only occurring a couple times a century in any particular galaxy. Betelgeuse is currently the top candidate for an explosion, followed by Eta Carinae.

The last star to explode in our galaxy, the Milky Way, that was visible on Earth, did so in 1603. In 1910, however, astronomers missed a supernova that occurred in the Sagittarius constellation, due to not being able to see it through the gas and dust produced by the Milky Way.

On Jan. 22 of this year, a supernova occurred in the M-82 galaxy and its remnants are still visible to this day, but diminishing.

Besides Red Giants, another type of unstable star are the variable stars that give off different emissions of light. These may look cool, Hanrahan said, but some are potentially dangerous to Earth’s ionosphere.

Hanrahan said that in Sagittarius, there is a star spinning around emitting dangerous waves that could be depleting our ionosphere of its ozone layer.

On July 23, 2012, a coronal mass ejection (CME), or a plasma eruption, originated from our own star, the sun. NASA believes that this eruption could have potentially wiped out technology on Earth.

The eruption blew through Earth’s orbital track, but luckily Earth wasn’t there at the time. The STEREO A spacecraft, one of two probes launched by NASA to orbit the sun — one in front of the Earth’s orbit, another following behind Earth’s orbit — wasn’t so lucky. From the readings, scientists believe that if this CME were to have hit Earth, we would still be trying to clean up the damage done to our electronic technology.

Scientists believe the January episode could have been stronger than the so-called Carrington event, a solar storm in 1859 that caused telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices and eventually disabling “the Victorian internet,” Hanrahan said.

After the slide show, Hanrahan carried the audience on an expedition across multiple galaxies, looking at different types of unstable stars.

Thanks to the updated Planetarium projection system, exploring the different types of stars gave the audience mesmerizing, real-time images of such wonders as the Crescent and Veil Nebulas, and also the Crab Nebula’s neutron star, created when part of a supernova exploded inward, creating a gaseous mass.

A dismayed “awww” erupted from the children in the audience as Hanrahan brought the expedition to a halt. He subdued the kids’ protests by wrapping up his show with the colorful “Galaxy Song”  sequence, as usual.

The MHCC Planetarium shows take place on the first Tuesday of every month. The cost is $2 for the general public, but students and staff get in free. Show times are at 6:00, 7:15 and 8:30 p.m.

The next show, on June 3, is titled “Saturn and the Summer Sky.”