It may sound stupid but what is a meteor shower

Question

It may sound stupid but what is a meteor shower

Answer 1

Who told you that a meteor shower sounds stupid?

Space rocks that burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in large numbers and in a short period of time. Typically when a comet get close th the Earth debris from its tail end up the the Earth's atmosphere and burns up because of the friction with the air.

Answer 2

When a comet visit the sun and goes back,it leaves lot of debris like icy matters,stones,water ice etc. These materials orbit the sun and earth in its round trip around the Sun,crosses this path causing meteor shower.Lot of meteors are coing from the same area of the sky

Answer 3

Meteors come flying from the sky.. like a shower...

Answer 4

Meteors are bits of dust and sand and bit up to about the size of a pea, that are minding their own business orbiting the Sun until WHAM, the Earth slams into them.  Meteor showers, like the Perseid Meteor Shower (PMS) are streams of stuff tossed off by a comet (Swift-Tuttle for the PMS).  As the comet orbits, stuff gets squirted into space along the orbit, and it spreads out over the entire length of the orbit.  So every year, when the Earth passes through the comet's orbit, we get a meteor shower.

Don't forget to bring your meteor soap and meteor washcloth to the meteor shower.

Answer 5

Meteor "showers" are actually fragments of comets.  The comet has long-since evaporated from traversing around the sun, but the specks of ice and dust that made the comet's tail still make the same orbit. (more or less.)   Once per year, the Earth will pass through this debris as it orbits the sun, and some of it will plow into Earth's atmosphere, creating a "shooting star".   There's a few of them that happen during the year.  

Answer 6

Meteors are small bits of dust and rock in space.  When the Earth passes by in it's orbit, they can hit us and burn up in the atmosphere.  A shower is caused when a comet passes through the Earth's orbit - comets melt as they come close to the Sun, so they leave ice and rocks in their wake, and eventually the Earth goes through that leftover rock and ice and we get a lot of meteors for a day or so - a meteor shower.  The comets that left the rock behind passed by many millions of years ago, but they left a lot of stuff so we'll get showers every year for a long time to come.