Meteor Shower

Ah.. it's 9:12am now, I'm supposed to go to class at 9:50am, can I finish this post on time??

Last night there were rumors about meteor shower happening after midnight, but I was too tired to check it out though, and I guess many people woke up in vain cuz no one update their meteor discovery on facebook this morning.

How does meteor shower come about?



You know comets... the naughty rock that travel far into the depth of our galaxy...they circle around the sun in a highly elliptical orbit, in which they would move faster when approaching the sun. They can spend hundreds and thousands of years out in the depths of the solar system before they return to Sun at their perihelion.

When faraway from the sun, the comet would gather dust and ice, which could be ammonia, water, methane or water, etc etc. Then when coming close to the sun, the heat from the sun (mind you when facing the sun out in the space,even at Mars' distance, it is super hot! cuz you aint got no ozone or the atmosphere to filter the amount of sunlight that reaches you~) would melt the ice and thus creating the long characteristic tail of a comet.



The tail of a comet could reach the length of 1 astronomical unit(A.U,the distance from the sun to Earth)

So when melting, some part of the meteorite that make up the comet is exposed, and together with the melting ice they are broken off from the meteor.



So when coming near to earth, the debris from the tail of the comet is attracted by the gravitational pull of Earth and thus the dust fall into the atmosphere, brush against the atmosphere of Earth and created spark and BINGO~~ there you have meteor shower~!



Okay it's 9:26am now I better get off to school =P


Malcolm

info:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~bds2/ltsn/ljm/JAVA/COMETORB/COMET.HTM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_shower