Meteor Showers Explained
Imagine a very cold comet consistently orbiting outer space. Because of the comet’s speed, there are particles that fall back behind it that are known as water vapor drags. These water vapor drags are composed of rocks from the comet itself and other compounds like frozen water, ammonia, methane and other volatile elements. When a particular comet gets near the sun which forms part of its orbit, some of these water vapor drags melt and are left out, and it eventually finds its way to meteoroid streams more commonly known as “dust trails”.
Some of these dust trails subsequently veers into the orbit path of the Earth and when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, it disintegrates and forms a meteor shower. The movements of these dust trails have been well studied and in fact the International Meteor Organization has come up with a Meteor Shower Calendar. The gravity of the planets surrounding the dust trails determine their movements, hence, IMO was able to compute its future locations. Meteor showers have tags and they are commonly named after the constellation where they are perceived to originate from.
This type of meteor movement study and position calculation were first done by two astronomers, Arthur Matthew Weld Downing and George Johnstone Stoney. They set their observation on the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle and they were able to come up with a decent calculation which matched the computations of Adolf Berberich of the Royal Astronomical Computation Institute ( Konigles Astronomisches Rechen Institut ) of Berlin, Germany in one of his independent endeavors. However, the very first accurate meteor storms computation for the next 50 years was made by Finland’s Esko Lyytinen, Robert McNaught, and David Asher.
However, some dust trails may act abnormally when it reaches the atmosphere of certain planet. For instance, dust trails grazing on Jupiter’s atmosphere tend to act differently, some speed up and some decelerate creating sudden bursts of meteor showers, which is also known as braiding or clumping.
Every year, on August 12, visible meteor showers can be observed. They come one meteor per minute. However, the best show of meteor showers that you can observe occurs on any day near November 17. It is dubbed as the King of Meteor Showers or the Leonids. Roughly a little bit over every thirty years, a shower storm is produced by Leonids with the magnificent rate of more than one thousand meteors per hour. Most celestial body with visible atmosphere experience meteor showers, but in different degrees. The most similar spectacular display of meteor showers to that of the Earth would be in Mars because of its atmosphere’s near parallelism to that of the Earth’s.
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