NOV 2, 2009 - Taurids is Meteor Showers Online's primer on the Taurids meteor swarm. This bifurcated stream of space dust has a northern and a southern branch, both discovered in 1869. By the middle of the last century, astronomer Fred Whipple postulated that the Taurids are ejecta from Comet Encke. Other astronomers make a case for the Taurids as having a link to the Tunguska meteor that exploded over Siberia in 1908. Imagine that: somewhere among the Taurids may lurk another Really Big Meteor of Tunguska proportions! The Taurids normally aren't an especially profuse meteor shower, generally averaging less than a dozen meteors an hour. But individual meteors associated with this storm can be large, brilliant and dramatic - the Tunguska event, for example.
