Why meteors light up the night sky
Jonti Horner, Donna Burton And Tanya Hill, The Conversation
Meteorite: fall vs find When scientists study newly recovered meteorites, they break them up into two types – falls and finds. Because the debris is moving in the same direction as it hits the Earth, the meteors in a given shower will appear to radiate from a small area on the night sky, known as the radiant. Showers and storms, young and old With each swing around the sun, the parent of a meteor shower adds more material to its debris stream, which continues to spread and disperse to space. The debris of that disintegration continued to orbit the sun and provided a spectacular epitaph for the comet with the Andromedid meteor storms. Credit: E. Weiß/Wikimedia Others streams rotate in, birthing new showers, and fresh streams are born as comets are flung onto new orbits.