I have read that meteor showers happen because earth passes through the debris left by the comets. If this is the case shouldn’t they be visible across the whole sky right from dusk to dawn?
In: Physics
The meteors-to-be are a trail of dust and debris that crosses Earth’s orbit.
The reason they appear to come from a certain constellation is that is the constellation that Earth’s movement is pointed towards right now.
The Earth is a sphere moving in a circle around the sun and there’s some sand in its path, the first part of the Earth to encounter this sand will be the side pointed in the direction of motion. Everywhere else will see the sand go by and it will seem to have come from that central point that’s in the direction of motion.
Since the Earth also rotates, the shower peaks each night shortly before dawn (when your side is pointed in the direction of motion), but you get some meteors over the rest of the night because they may have been a little further off course and got pulled in by Earth’s gravity
The thing you might be missing is that the fragment cloud is also moving through space… the earth passed through it as it passed through the earth’s orbital path..
The debris that the Earth still passes through is stuff that we’re just skimming the edge of. Anything that would do more was already picked up by the Earth long ago.
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