One of the Best Meteor Showers of 2025 Is About to Begin—and It Can Be Seen Across the U.S.
According to Space.com, to catch the shower's peak, you should start observing the night skies around 11 p.m. local time on Aug. 12 when the rates of shooting stars increase. The peak display will continue until dawn on Aug. 13. During this viewing window, you can expect to see an average of up to 100 meteors per hour.
The Perseids meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through debris (bits of ice and rock) left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, a comet that is also the largest known object to repeatedly pass by Earth. The comet debris moves at around 133,200 mph in space and is typically the size of a grain of sand. The fragments become visible when they enter the atmosphere and burn up in a bright burst of light, streaking through the sky. Although the debris enters the Earth's atmosphere, it rarely hits the ground.
The Perseid meteor shower is most easily seen from the Northern Hemisphere, but is also visible in the mid-southern latitudes. Although it can technically be viewed from anywhere in the U.S., the meteor shower is much easier to see in dark-sky destinations where there is less light pollution. It is also helpful to find somewhere where the sky is wide and open since buildings and mountains can obscure the view.
No telescopes or binoculars are needed to see the Persied meteor shower, but Space.com recommends giving your eyes 30 minutes to adjust to the dark. It also helps to know where the meteors will come from.
According to NASA, the meteor shower radiates from the Perseus constellation, which follows the easier-to-find Cassiopeia constellation across the night sky. If you can find Perseus, you'll know where the meteors will streak across the sky during the celestial event's peak.
The Perseid meteor shower occurs annually in August, however in 2028, the shower is expected to evolve into a storm that will be even more spectacular than the standard, annual event.
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CNN
39 minutes ago
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Two meteorites found in the Sahara could be from the solar system's least studied rocky planet, scientists say
Researchers suspect that two meteorites found in the Sahara Desert in 2023 may originally have come from Mercury, which would make them the first identified fragments of the solar system's innermost planet. The least studied and most mysterious of the solar system's rocky planets, Mercury is so close to the sun that exploring it is difficult even for probes. Only two uncrewed spacecraft have visited it to date — Mariner 10, launched in 1973, and MESSENGER, launched in 2004. A third, BepiColombo, is en route and due to enter orbit around the planet in late 2026. Scientists know little about Mercury's geology and composition, and they have never been able to study a fragment of the planet that landed on Earth as a meteorite. In contrast, there are more than 1,100 known samples from the moon and Mars in the database of the Meteoritical Society, an organization that catalogs all known meteorites. These 1,100 meteorites originated as fragments flung from the surfaces of the moon and Mars during asteroid impacts before making their way to Earth after a journey through space. Not every planet is likely to eject fragments of itself Earth-ward during collisions. Though Venus is closer to us than Mars is, its greater gravitational pull and thick atmosphere may prevent the launch of impact debris. But some astronomers believe that Mercury should be capable of generating meteors. 'Based on the amount of lunar and Martian meteorites, we should have around 10 Mercury meteorites, according to dynamical modeling,' said Ben Rider-Stokes, a postdoctoral researcher in achondrite meteorites at the UK's Open University and lead author of a study on the Sahara meteorites, published in June in the journal Icarus. 'However, Mercury is a lot closer to the sun, so anything that's ejected off Mercury also has to escape the sun's gravity to get to us. It is dynamically possible, just a lot harder. No one has confidently identified a meteorite from Mercury as of yet,' he said, adding that no mission thus far has been capable of bringing back physical samples from the planet either. If the two meteorites found in 2023 — named Northwest Africa 15915 (NWA 15915) and Ksar Ghilane 022 (KG 022) — were confirmed to be from Mercury, they would greatly advance scientists' understanding of the planet, according to Rider-Stokes. But he and his coauthors are the first to warn of some inconsistencies in matching those space rocks to what scientists know about Mercury. The biggest is that the fragments appear to have formed about 500 million years earlier than the surface of Mercury itself. However, according to Rider-Stokes, this finding could be based on inaccurate estimates, making a conclusive assessment unlikely. 'Until we return material from Mercury or visit the surface,' he said, 'it will be very difficult to confidently prove, and disprove, a Mercurian origin for these samples.' But there are some compositional clues that suggest the meteorites might have a link to the planet closest to the sun. It's not the first time that known meteorites have been associated with Mercury. The previous best candidate, based on the level of interest it piqued in astronomers, was a fragment called Northwest Africa (NWA) 7325, which was reportedly found in southern Morocco in early 2012. Rider-Stokes said that was the first meteorite to be potentially associated with Mercury: 'It got a lot of attention. A lot of people got very excited about it.' Further analysis, however, showed a richness in chrome at odds with Mercury's predicted surface composition. More recently, astronomers have suggested that a class of meteorites called aubrites — from a small meteorite that landed in 1836 in Aubres, France — might come from Mercury's mantle, the layer below the surface. 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an hour ago
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The West's Megadrought Might Not Let Up for Decades, Study Suggests
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Geek Wire
2 hours ago
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Rivals team up: SpaceX sends 24 satellites into orbit for Amazon's Project Kuiper
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