The arrival of the Quadrants is the most important and spectacular astronomical event of the beginning of the year.

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Up to 130 shooting stars per hour can be seen at the beginning of January with the arrival of the Quadrantid meteor shower, according to the From the Svábhegyi Astronomical Observatory’s announcement. The shooting star will be most spectacular in the early hours of January 4, and you will have to look for it in the eastern direction.

According to the observatory, the arrival of the Quadrantites is the most important and spectacular astronomical event of the beginning of the year. It competes with August’s Perseids (average maximum of 84 shooting stars) and December’s Geminids (average maximum of 88 shower meteors per hour). By the way, in December, according to MTI, it was written about the latter that ideally it could bring 120 shooting stars per hour.

Shooting stars, or meteors, are made of dust particles and pieces of rock that hurtle through space at speeds up to several times the speed of a spaceship. A long, brightly lit ion channel is created in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which people see as a shooting star.

The parent object of the Quadrantid meteor shower is the asteroid 2003 EH1, only 3 kilometers in diameter. It is interesting that asteroids rarely produce debris clouds in their orbits that form the basis of meteor showers. However, the strange celestial body is still responsible for the Quadrantid meteor shower, which suggests that 2003 EH1 is actually the nucleus of comet C/1490 Y1, observed by astronomers in the Far East five hundred years ago. This object may have left behind the thin cloud of dust that meets the Earth every year in the first days of January, crossing our planet’s orbit around the Sun.