Look, up in the sky
Transcript
Shawn Laatsch:
Meteors basically are particles that fall through our atmosphere and they burn up and they look like little shooting — or falling — stars, people sometime call them.
Most of them burn up in the atmosphere and never make it to the ground. And it’s estimated that there’s somewhere around 100 tons of material that fall through our atmosphere and burn up every day.
In terms of trying to see meteorites, you can see one or two on any given night but they only last for an instant, so you have to be looking at the right time.
However, there are better times to see them, particularly meteor showers. The Perseid meteor shower in August is one of the better showers. It peaks around the 12th of the month and you can see 50 or 60 meteors per hour during that.
There’s also the Leonids in November, the Orionids in October. Basically, the Earth is passing through debris leftover by a comet, and that’s when we get the meteor showers.
On occasion, objects do survive the passage and make it to the ground and those meteorites, as they’re called, once they actually land on Earth, are of interest to scientists in helping us understand our solar system.