Will there be no night on August 12? Here's the truth

Know the truth behind reports that there will not be any night on August 12 this year

A few media outlets have reported that 12th August won’t have night at all, a hoax which has gone viral on WhatsApp. Rather it’s an exaggeration of an event that will witness a huge Meteor Shower which is going to be quite bright. Some astronomers have even claimed that it will be the brightest meteor shower in human history on August 12, which is unsubstantiated.

According to NASA’s “2017 Meteor Shower Activity Forecast for Earth Orbit”, this year’s Perseid meteor shower will likely not even be the brightest Perseid shower of the past two years. The meteor shower in question, the Perseids, will indeed peak on 12 August 2017. Perseids shower are already diverging from a radiant point in N Perseus as they can be seen from the end of July through the end of August reaching its peak on 12 August.

Perseid activity this year is expected to be higher than normal but less than in 2016. It may reach nearly 80% of last year’s Perseid rate.

According to NASA, the best Perseid shower was observed in 1993, when the Perseid rates (number of meteors a single viewer would see in an hour of peak activity) topped 300 per hour.

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The meteors visible during this shower are remnants of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle during its many trips through our part of the solar system. The shooting stars will be streaming through the skies at a more normal, hourly pace of 80-100. Meteor showers happen when the particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. They burn and create a flash that we call meteors, or shooting stars.

Also Read: NASA to launch world’s lightest satellite built by Indian teen on June 21

And since NASA says about night in US, we being in India, in Day time may hardly notice.

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