Meteor Showers 101 | National Geographic

(Haunting music) - [Narrator] Nearly 50 tons of space debris crash onto the Earth every day. While some debris shyly dissipate into the atmosphere, others display a spectacular light show.

(Mellow music) Meteor showers occur when the Earth's orbit intersects with the orbit of a comet. As comets travel, they leave behind trails of rocky material, oftentimes the size of pebbles or grains of sand, but sometimes as large as boulders. Every year, the Earth crosses these trails of debris known as meteoroid streams, and the planet becomes sprinkled with rocky material.

The debris then race through the Earth's atmosphere, creating friction with air particles and generating vast amounts of heat. This heat vaporizes and illuminates the debris as they fall, creating streaks of light in the sky, popularly known as shooting stars. These celestial light shows are often named after the constellation where they appear to originate as seen from Earth's surface. Meteor showers that seem to fall from the constellation Perseus are called the Perseids, and those appearing from the constellation Gemini are called the Geminids.

About 30 meteor showers can be seen from Earth throughout the course of a year, and because the showers are timed with Earth's orbit, the celestial phenomenon are cyclical and occur at regular intervals. For example, the Perseid meteor shower happens every August, and the Geminid meteor shower happens every December.

Meteor showers have inspired awe and admiration for millennia. In Christian tradition, the Perseid meteor showers symbolize the tears of a saint, Saint Lawrence, who was executed in August of the year 258, and in the first century A.D., the astronomer Ptolemy believed that shooting stars were a sign of the gods looking upon mortals and listening to their wishes.

Inspiring everything from making wishes to reveling at the sky, meteor showers are a reminder of our place in a dynamic and beautiful cosmic ecosystem.

(Melodic music)