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What is a meteor shower?

A meteor shower occurs when a cloud of debris from a comet or asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere and burns up, leaving bright trails. Most often these debris particles are not much bigger than grains of sand.

In space anything up to about a metre in diameter is technically termed a meteoroid; when a meteoroid hits the Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes a meteor. A group of meteors is a meteor shower.

Because the particles are all moving in the same direction, to an observer on the ground they appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. 

Source: cosmosmagazine.com | Images: x | x | x | x | x