Keith Wilson has had a lifelong interest in the night sky and has written for space and astronomy publications in the UK and USA. He lives under the dark night skies of the Isle of Gigha.
As well as planets, our solar system has lots of space rocks.
The biggest ones are called asteroids and the smaller ones meteoroids. Meteoroids range in size from a grain of dust to a metre or more wide.
When we see a ‘shooting star’ in the night sky we are seeing a small piece of matter from our solar system entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up around 100km above our heads.
These small particles of dust move very fast and when they hit our atmosphere they evaporate, sometimes leaving a trail of gas across the night sky. These ‘shooting stars’ are called meteors.
When our planet comes across a number of these particles at once we call them ‘meteor showers’.
They come from the many comets that travel through our solar system. As a comet gets close to the Sun, it heats up and starts to evaporate leaving a trail of debris in its wake.
Each time a comet swings around the Sun, it fills up its path with more debris. When this trail of debris crosses the orbit of our planet, we smash into it, creating a shower of meteors.
When larger chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, not all of it evaporates. The centre of the rock will likely survive all the way to the Earth’s surface and, when it hits the ground, it is known as a meteorite.
Thousands have been recovered over the years from all across Earth. The largest meteorite found is the 60 tonne Hoba iron meteorite in Namibia in south-west Africa.
On the night of November 17/18, our planet will encounter the Leonid meteor shower, which are fragments from the Comet Temple-Tuttle.
Some of the particles can be larger than usual and this can result in spectacular bright fireballs appearing in the night sky.
The Leonid meteor shower of 1833 was spectacular and, in the 1960s, the shower produced one of the greatest meteor storms in living memory.
Thousands of meteors were seen every minute in the early morning of November 17, 1966. Leonid meteors did, briefly, fall like rain.
Meteors showers get their names from the point in the night sky from which they appear to come from.
This shower’s name comes from the constellation Leo, the lion.
However, you don’t need to know where they appear to come from as they will be streaking in all directions and so can be seen in any part of the night sky. Just look up!