What Causes a Meteor Shower?
A meteor shower happens when the earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by a passing comet. Here’s how is works. When a comet passes through space, it leaves behind a trail of particles made up of mostly metal, stone, and ice. As the earth orbits the sun, it passes through this trail of particles. As these particles collide the outer layer of the earth’s atmosphere, they burn up, causing bright “shooting stars” across the sky.
Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The descriptive milky is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek ?a?a??a? ?????? (galaxias k_klos, milky circle). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe.
