This wonderful composition shows an Orionid meteor streaking through the large Orion Nebula (M42) as well as the adjacent Running Man Nebula (M43) during a deep-sky astrophoto. While narrow-field views can occasionally reveal a spectacular individual meteor, wide-field views, like those with your naked eye, make for the most spectacular meteor shower viewing experiences. (Credit: JustAstrophotography — Justin Bradt/Astrobin)
The Orionids meteor shower peaks October 20th/21st here in 2025, coinciding with a new Moon. See the brightest shooting stars of the year!
Every year, the same meteor showers recur once again.
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This comet, imaged in 2015 and known as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, brightened sufficiently to become as bright as magnitude +4: visible to the naked human eye even under fairly light-polluted conditions. When Comet Halley returns, it will only be about 5–6 times brighter than this, but when Comet Swift-Tuttle next returns, it will be about 20 times brighter. Swift-Tuttle is far more massive and dangerous than the other known periodic comets. Although comets have been recorded for thousands of years, their periodic nature was only uncovered in the 18th century, by Edmond Halley. (Credit: John Vermette / MIT News)
As Earth revolves around the Sun, it periodically crosses cometary and asteroidal orbits.
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Each year, Earth passes through the debris stream of various comets, including Comet Swift-Tuttle, which creates the visual phenomenon known as the Perseid meteor shower, and that of Halley’s comet, which creates two meteor showers: the Eta Aquarids and the Orionids. Although Comet Swift-Tuttle remains the single most dangerous object known to humanity, it’s Comet Tempel-Tuttle that has the honor of being the first comet linked to meteor showers (by John Couch Adams in the 1860s), being the parent body of the Leonids. (Credit: Ian Webster; Data: NASA / CAMS / Peter Jenniskens (SETI Institute))
When crossing occurs, their debris impacts Earth’s atmosphere.
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As they orbit the Sun, comets and asteroids typically break up over time, with debris between the chunks along the path of the orbit getting stretched out to create debris streams. These streams cause meteor showers when the Earth passes through that debris stream: with younger showers having more concentrated debris streams around the parent body’s nucleus and older showers having a more uniform debris stream. This image taken by Spitzer along a comet’s path shows small fragments outgassing, but also shows the main debris stream that gives rise to the meteor showers that occur in our Solar System. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/W. Reach (SSC/Caltech))
The longer the period of the comet or asteroid, the faster its meteors move when striking Earth.
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This map shows the debris stream of Comet Encke, a short-period comet in orbit around the Sun and the parent of the Taurid meteor shower. For many young comets or asteroids, there is a higher density of debris associated with the location of the main (parent) body of the debris stream, while older streams are more uniform. The Taurids and Geminids are marked by short-period parent bodies, with slower meteors, while the Leonids, Perseids, and Orionids have longer-period parent bodies, and hence, faster meteors. (Credit: M.S. Kelley et al., ApJ, 2006)
