solar eclipses are rare and you can
never predict when an Aurora will
illuminate the sky but there's one
cosmic light show we can always count on
meteor showers they happen around the
same time each year and have been doing
so for centuries
but despite their brilliance and beauty
it doesn't take much to make a meteor
shower you just need three ingredients
the Sun earth and a comet comets have
been around since the dawn of our solar
system over four-and-a-half billion
years ago they formed out of the same
disc of gas and dust that created earth
and the other seven planets and like the
other planets they to orbit the Sun but
that's where the similarities end
most planets orbit the Sun on fairly
circular orbits
whereas comets take a more elliptical
path through our solar system check out
Halley's Comet for example right now
it's beyond the orbit of the furthest
planet Neptune but over the next 50
years it will travel about three billion
miles toward the inner reaches of our
solar system eventually flying past
Earth in the year 2060 one and it's
encounters like this that make meteor
showers possible because as a comet
approaches the inner solar system the
sun's radiation heats up ice under the
surface and as that ice turns to a vapor
it generates powerful outbursts of gas
and dust
sometimes ejecting hundreds of tons of
material into space per second the
result is a brilliant stream of debris
called the comet tail or coma which can
stretch hundreds to thousands of miles
across in fact space is littered with
comet tail debris that our planet passes
through each year and when that happens
the debris strikes our atmosphere at
over 100,000 miles an hour
incinerating the four-and-a-half billion
year old fragments in seconds this
produces brilliant flashes of light that
we call a me
your shower now some meteor showers are
more spectacular than others giving us
anywhere from a few to over a hundred
meteors an hour and even the same meteor
shower can vary from year to year it all
depends on how much debris we scoop up
as we pass through the tale regardless
Comet tail's tend to follow the same
path as the comet itself which means
they pass through the same spot along
Earth's orbit that's why we get the same
meteor showers around the same time each
year at the end of October for example
we pass through the tale of Halley's
Comet which gives us the Orionids meteor
shower and every August we pass through
comment Swift Tuttle's tale which we see
as the Perseids meteor shower but it's
not just October in August meteor
showers occur year-round so check your
calendar to see when the next one will
be coming to a sky near you