A meteor shower can occur when Earth passes through a trail of debris (tiny rocks and dust) left behind by a comet or, less often, an asteroid. As Earth moves along its orbit, it sometimes crosses one of these dusty streams; many small particles then plunge into our atmosphere at high speed and burn up, producing lots of meteors in a short time.

Quick Scoop

  • Earth must move through a meteoroid stream in space, usually composed of debris shed by a comet as it approaches the Sun and its ices vaporize.
  • The debris particles hit our atmosphere on nearly parallel paths, so the meteors appear to radiate from a single point in the sky (the “radiant”), giving the event the look of a coordinated shower.
  • This crossing happens at the same place in Earth’s orbit each year, so many well‑known meteor showers (like the Perseids and Geminids) recur annually around the same dates.

In short: a meteor shower happens when Earth runs into a comet’s dusty trail, and all those tiny bits of rock burn up overhead together, lighting up the night sky.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.