Meteor shower show for Britain

Robert Jobson12 April 2012

A celestial light show is promised tonight - weather permitting - as the earth ploughs through a thick cloud of comet dust.

The Perseid meteor shower, which puts on a display at this time every year, is now approaching its maximum intensity. It will peak tonight, sending shooting stars blazing trails across the sky at a rate which could reach two a minute.

This year's Perseid show should be a good one because there will be virtually no moon, and the meteor numbers are expected to be higher than usual.

The Perseids, which have mystified and terrified sky watchers for nearly 2,000 years, are so named because they appear to emerge from the eastern constellation of Perseus.

The meteors are small pieces of debris shed by a huge six-mile-wide comet, Swift-Tuttle, that sails into our solar system from a distant region of space beyond the planet Pluto every 135 years.

Ten years ago Swift-Tuttle passed the sun, and it is now heading back towards the far-off Oort Cloud on the outer edge of the solar system, which is home to millions of similar comets.

When the Perseid particles hit the top of the earth's atmosphere at 135,000mph they become glowing hot and appear as bright shooting stars criss-crossing the sky in all directions.

Swift-Tuttle was first observed in 1862 by two American astronomers, Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle, who gave the comet its name.

The earliest record of the Perseids was in 36AD during China's Han dynasty. After this they were described again and again over the centuries in Asia and Europe.

In medieval England they were called "the burning tears of St Lawrence" that fell every August around the anniversary of the saint's martyrdom by the Roman emperor Valerian in 258AD.

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