What is a Meteor Shower?
Besides the sporadic meteors, there are sometimes meteor showers, in which meteors from a lot of debris in the same orbit hits the Earth. Most meteor showers are traceable to particular comets. Meteor showers vary in intensity. Some appear as weak showers barely distinguishable from sporadics, while others appear as (very are) meteor storms in which thousands of meteors are seen per minute. There is another characteristic of shower meteors which distinguishes them from sporadics. Since all of the meteors in a shower are moving in the same orbit, and hit the earth in a parallel stream. Because of our perspective on Earth, they appear to radiate from a particular point in the sky called the radiant. You may have seen a similar effect driving in a car on a snowy or rainy day. All the flakes (or drops) seem to come from directly in front of you, and fan out to the sides. Although meteors don’t always appear to begin at the radiant, if you extend the line of their flight backwards, it will
A meteor shower is an astronomical event in which hundreds or thousands of dust-sized meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere and almost immediately burn up, creating a short-lived glowing streak in the night sky. These particles form a lingering trail, called a meteor stream, behind a comet as it passes around the sun. When the Earth passes through this debris field, the result is a meteor shower. Because meteoroids are rarely larger than a grain of sand, a meteor shower is usually not considered a threat to the planet. On any given night, observers from Earth can expect to see at least one or two meteors streak across the sky. There are literally dozens of different comet streams that can produce a meteor shower as the Earth navigates through them. Most of the time, only a small population in a limited area can enjoy a particularly strong meteor shower. Even regularly scheduled meteor shower events, such as the Perseids or the Leonids, vary in intensity every year. A meteor shower is
As a comet travels close to the sun, it heats up and part of the comet vaporizes. After a comet has orbited the sun many times, a lot of small pieces of the comet are left along the comet’s path. A meteor shower happens when Earth passes through the path of a comet. When this happens the bits of comet debris, most no larger than a grain of sand, create streaks of light in the night sky as they burn up in Earth’s atmosphere Bits of debris which enter Earth’s atmosphere are called meteors. On any night, there are several small meteors which shoot across the sky. However, during a meteor shower, tens to hundreds of meteors can be seen each hour. Many of these meteor showers can be predicted and occur at the same time each year.
