Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing shooting stars flashing. These shooting stars are meteors, which are small pieces of rock from space burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Comets are icy bodies made of frozen gases, rock and dust. As comets go around the sun, they leave behind trails of remains called debris. This debris is what makes meteoroids. Meteoroids can also come from rocky objects in space called asteroids.
When Earth passes through a comet’s trail, many meteoroids enter the planet’s atmosphere at high speeds. They burn up and become meteors, creating bright flashes of light known as meteor showers (see graphic).
During a meteor shower, we see the paths of many meteors that seem to all come from one point in the sky, called the radiant point. There are more meteors as the radiant rises higher in the sky.
The best time to see a meteor shower is when the radiant is at its highest point.
A measurement called the Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) describes the number of meteors that can be seen every hour at the best conditions. But we usually see fewer meteors every hour than the ZHR. This is because of how dark the sky is, if our view is blocked, and how high the radiant is.
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