Irish star-gazers have a chance to see a very active meteor shower over the next few days.<\/p>\n
The Lyrid meteor shower – which is also known as ‘the harps’ – is caused when the Earth passes through debris left by a passing comet.<\/p>\n
We could see up to 20 shooting stars per hour when conditions are right.<\/p>\n
Space commentator Leo Enright says the last time this happened was in the years following the famine.<\/p>\n
“The last time this comet passed near the Earth was 1861, it is probably not the most auspicious comet in Irish history.<\/p>\n
“To add insult to injury, it is named Thatcher.<\/p>\n
“If you missed it last night, don’t give up because this meteor shower continues for several days.<\/p>\n
“As long as there is no clouds, there should be an opportunity to see more shooting stars than a normal night.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish star-gazers have a chance to see a very active meteor shower over the next few days. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-411628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}