The Eta Aquariid meteor shower was active in April-May 2024. Comprising burning space debris moving at speeds of around 66 km per second into Earth’s atmosphere, these showers are seen in May every year, and are best visible to countries such as Indonesia and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.
Eta Aquariid meteor shower
- The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is formed when Earth passes through the orbital plane of the famous Halley’s Comet, which takes about 76 years to orbit the Sun once.
- Meteor showers come from comets.
- Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of our solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago. Comets are composed of dust, rock and ice, and orbit around the Sun in highly elliptical orbits which can, in some cases, take hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
- A total of 3,910 comets are currently known, although billions more are theorised to be orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort cloud.
- Comets come in different sizes, although most are roughly 10 km wide. As they come closer to the Sun, comets “heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet”.
- This material also forms a tail which stretches millions of miles.
- Meteors are simply grains of dust or rock that burn up as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. This burning also creates a brief tail.
- Most meteors are tiny they completely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, once in a while, a large enough meteor passes through and hits the ground at which time it is called a meteorite, and often causes significant damage.
(Source: IE)
