I understand that meteor showers are due to the Earth passing through the debris left by a comet, but shouldn’t the Earth clear out any lingering meteors after a few revolutions?
In: Planetary Science
**The whole debris field is orbiting too. Every year we take a different track through it.**
The stuff the debris came from was orbiting, so even debris that breaks off maintains the orbit because there’s nothing stopping it.
So every year the Earth takes a different track through it. It’s not sitting there stationary and we take the same trajectory through it each year. We might eventually clear the whole thing but not not any time soon. The point is it’s not just one Earth-sized path through the debris we’d have to clear out.
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