During the Perseid meteor shower, you can see around 50 to 100 meteors lighting up every hour when they hit the atmosphere. (Unsplash)

NASA Explains the Perseid Meteor Shower

Nitin MisraAugust 8, 23 Meteor, NASA, Space

Have you ever witnessed a captivating display of shooting stars cascading from the sky? It is undeniably one of the most enchanting spectacles one can behold. Contrary to popular belief, these celestial objects are not actual stars, but rather meteors, giving rise to the captivating phenomenon known as a meteor shower.

According to NASA, a meteor is a space rock that enters the Earth’s atmosphere. When it falls, the air makes it really hot due to friction. The bright line we see is not the rock itself, but the hot air around it. When many space rocks hit the Earth’s atmosphere together, we call it a meteor shower.

What is the Perseid meteor shower?

According to NASA, the Perseid meteor shower is the best of the year and takes place in August. These meteors are fast and bright, leaving trails of light and color as they move across the sky. During the Perseids, you can see about 50-100 meteors per hour. They usually appear when the weather is warm and the nights are nice to watch the sky.

The Perseids are special because they often create fireballs. Fireballs are large bursts of light and color that last longer than a regular shooting star. This happens because the fireballs come from larger pieces of material in comets. They are also brighter and are more visible even if the magnitude is greater than -3.

For the best view of the Perseid meteor shower, you can go to the Northern Hemisphere and look at the sky before sunrise. Sometimes you can start seeing meteors from this shower as early as 10pm.

Meteors come from fragments of comets and parts of broken asteroids. When comets approach the Sun, they leave behind dusty trails. Earth takes these paths every year, and that’s when the pieces hit our atmosphere. They burn and form colorful streaks in the sky.

The Perseid meteor shower comes from debris from a comet called 109P/Swift-Tuttle. This comet takes 133 years to orbit the Sun. In 1865, Giovanni Schiaparelli realized that this comet caused the Perseids. Comet Swift-Tuttle last came close to our inner solar system in 1992. Comet Swift-Tuttle was discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle in 1862. It is a large comet with a nucleus 16 miles (26 kilometers) wide. (This is almost twice the size of the object believed to have caused the end of the dinosaurs.)