The Orionid Meteor Shower Will Light Up the Skies This Weekend
The Orionid Meteor Shower Will Light Up the Skies This Weekend
Halley’s Comet last visited us in 1986, and it isn’t scheduled to pass by earth again until 2061. This weekend, though, you might get to see debris from the legendary comet light up the night sky. The Orionid meteor shower will peak early Sunday morning across the United States, as the earth crosses through a cloud of debris thrown off the comet during its 75-year-long orbit around the sun.
“Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, the source of the Orionids,” said Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour.”
Comets heat up as they travel towards the sun, leaving behind tails of dust, ice, rock and other particles. Some of this debris lingers, and each fall—usually around mid-October—the earth passes through a cloud of Halley’s Comet debris. When the particles enter the atmosphere at extremely high speeds, they disintegrate in a burning flash, producing a momentary streak of light across the sky known as a meteor:
Meteors are produced when remnants of debris left by comets incinerate as they descend through earth’s atmosphere. Image via NASA
The Orionid meteor shower is named because, from our vantage point, it appears that all of its meteors emanate from a single point, a bit to the left of the constellation Orion. For all meteor showers, in fact, the meteors seem to come from a fixed point (called the radiant) that slowly moves across the sky during the night. This is because of perspective, the same way that a long straight road appears to terminate at a single point on the horizon.