Meteor showers

Showers of meteors, in which the rate of meteor sightings temporarily increases at approximately the same time each year, have been recorded since ancient times. On rare occasions, such showers are very dramatic, with thousands of meteoroids falling per hour. More often, the usual hourly rate of roughly 5 observed meteors increases to about 10–50.

Meteors in showers characteristically are all moving in the same direction in space. As a consequence, plots of observed meteoroid trajectories on a map of the sky converge at a single point, the radiant of the shower, for the same reason that parallel railroad tracks appear to converge at a distance. A shower is usually named for the constellation (or for a star in the constellation) that contains its radiant. The introduction of photography to meteorite studies confirmed the theory developed from naked-eye observations that meteors belonging to a particular shower have not only the same radiant but similar orbits as well. In other words, the meteoroids responsible for meteor showers move in confined streams (called meteor streams) around the Sun. The introduction of radar observation led to the discovery of new meteor showers—and thus of new meteor streams—that were invisible to the eye and to cameras because they came from radiants in the daytime sky. All told, about 2,000 showers have been identified.

Of great importance, and also fully confirmed by photographic data, is the association of several meteor showers with the orbits of active comets. A list of the more important showers and associated comets is given in the table. As a comet travels near the Sun, it is heated and its abundant volatile ices (frozen gases) vaporize, releasing less volatile material in the form of dust and larger grains up to perhaps 1 cm (0.4 inch) across. The shower associated with a given comet thus represents debris shed from that comet along its orbit, which the orbit of Earth intersects annually. When Earth passes through this stream of debris, a meteor shower is produced.

The Leonid meteor shower represents a recently formed meteor stream. This shower, though it occurs every year, tends to increase greatly in visual strength every 33 or 34 years, which is the orbital period of the parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle. Such behaviour results from the fact that these meteoroids are mostly still clustered in a compact swarm moving in the orbit of the comet. Over the next 1,000 years or so, the slightly different orbits of the meteoroids will disperse them more uniformly along the orbit of the comet. Meteor streams for which this has occurred produce showers that are usually weaker but often more consistent in strength from one occurrence to the next. Over a still longer period of about 10,000 years, gravitational perturbations by the planets will disperse the orbits of the meteoroids to the extent that their identities as members of a stream will disappear.

One strange example exists of a major meteor shower clearly associated with an object that at first glance does not resemble a comet. The parent object of the Geminid shower has all the appearances of a small Earth-crossing asteroid. Discovered in 1983, it does not exhibit the usual cometary features of a nebulous head and long tail and so was placed among the asteroids and named Phaethon. Most researchers believe Phaethon is the burned-out remnant of a once-active comet, but its nature may only be established with observations by spacecraft. For additional information about Phaethon, see asteroid: Asteroids in unusual orbits.

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