(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)
