The Phoenicids meteor shower
Key facts
- Peak
- around 1–2 December
- Active
- about 1–5 December
- Rate at peak (ZHR)
- variable: about 100 in 1956; weak since
- Speed
- about 15–18 km/s
- Radiant
- Phoenix (recent weak returns from nearer the border with Sculptor)
- Parent body
- Comet 289P/Blanpain
Dates shift slightly from year to year. This year's peak is in the events calendar, and the meteor-shower planner shows how high the radiant climbs from where you live, night by night.
The Phoenicids are a southern December shower famous for one remarkable night and for a comet that was lost for nearly two hundred years.
The 1956 display. On 5 December 1956, observers on the Japanese Antarctic research ship Soya, on its way to Antarctica, saw an unexpected shower of slow meteors radiating from Phoenix, with rates of about 100 an hour. Others in the southern hemisphere also reported it. In following years the shower was weak or absent.
The lost comet. The parent is comet 289P/Blanpain, discovered in 1819 by Jean-Jacques Blanpain at Marseille. It was seen only at that return and then lost. In 2003 a sky survey found a small object, 2003 WY25, that looked like an asteroid. Its orbit matched that of Blanpain's comet, and in 2004 a faint fuzzy coma was spotted around it, proving it was the old comet, now mostly inactive. It seems to have largely fallen apart, and the 1956 display probably came from material shed as it did so. The comet's nucleus is only a few hundred metres across.
Since then. Forecasters calculated where Blanpain's old trails lie, and predicted weak encounters in December 2014 and December 2019. Observers recorded small enhancements of faint, slow meteors, mostly by camera. Further encounters are expected in some future years.
Why so slow? The comet's orbit is like Earth's in direction, so its dust arrives at only about 15 to 18 kilometres per second. The meteors drift across the sky.
What to expect. In most years, very little. In a good year, slow and sometimes bright meteors, best in the evening.
Viewing. Phoenix is a southern constellation below Sculptor, high in the evening from Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa and South America in early December. From the UK it never rises.
Viewing tips
- Watch from the southern hemisphere in the evening, when Phoenix is high.
- Find Achernar, the bright star at the end of Eridanus, and look north-east of it.
- Check forecasts for predicted trail encounters.
- Expect slow meteors that cross a large part of the sky.
- Use a camera, as recent returns have been mostly faint.
Read about the parent: Comet Blanpain, and the other comets behind meteor showers.