yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Meteor Showers 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

(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)

More Articles

View All
Surviving a Firefight | No Man Left Behind
One thing you have to understand about an SCES soldier, you know, during them six months of selection, what we do is knock them soldiers down physically, mentally, everything. And they get back up and they keep moving on, and you just keep getting over ea…
Writing decimals and fractions from number lines
We’re told to express the point on the number line as both a fraction and a decimal, so pause this video and have a go at that. All right, now let’s do this together. We can see that the point in question is at a higher value than four and less than five…
White House Wants To Cancel Stimulus | My Response
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here. So, I have an extra bonus video for you today because I was browsing the internet this morning—like I do pretty much every morning—and I came across something rather unexpected. Even more unexpected than unemploymen…
Warren Buffett on Bitcoin: Has His Opinion Changed?
Bitcoin, it’s ingenious and blockchain is important, but Bitcoin has no unique value at all. It doesn’t produce anything. You stare at it all day and no little bitcoins come out or anything like that. It is a delusion, basically. One point this weekend y…
Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders
I am Jarrod. I am one of the partners at YC, and I’m gonna talk about starting hard tech and biotech companies set of curiosity in the colonies here today. Who is starting something like a hard tech or a biotech company? Okay, a handful of folks, nice. Ex…
What Truly Matters To A Stoic
Hello everyone and welcome! This is the seventh edition already of the Einzelgänger Q&A. A while ago, I got a question from a follower named Sofia, below my video about Stoicism and not giving a… you know what. This particular video is about caring le…