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 particles that form the meteor shower are not just sitting there in space. Rather, they follow approximately the same orbit as the comet they came from, albeit with a spread of some millions of miles. Earth, by comparison, is tiny and only sweeps out a tiny portion of this cloud of meteoroids.
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