Paper on The Leonids Meteor Showers
Paper on The Leonids Meteor Showers
"Late every autumn around November 17th or 18th, in the still, silent hours before dawn, dedicated meteor watchers have long kept a vigil. In the cold early morning darkness the sky glimmers with a preview of early spring constellations. Leading them up in the east is Leo. Its familiar Sickle asterism, a backward question mark, seems especially full of meaning these nights, for on the cutting edge of the Sickle's curved hook is the radiant of the greatest of all meteor showers" (Roe).
The Leonids are called the "Kings of meteor showers" for good reason; they light up the sky brilliantly with white streaks, and occasionally a ball of fire that seems to fall toward earth. First, to understand the Leonids, you must understand meteoroids and comets.
Comets are large pieces of ice, rock, and metal. They form in the outer reaches of our solar system, near the distances of Uranus and Neptune. They formed where there was plenty of water and temperatures were cold enough for water to freeze into balls of ice. These pieces of ice then condensed under the force of gravity from the nearby planets to form comets. Often referred to as "dirty snowballs" or "dirty icebergs", these comets are held in two belts in our solar system, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud. The Kuiper Belt has a plane of approximately that of our earth; it is about 500 AU from our sun. The Oort cloud is a vast holding tank for the majority of our solar systems comets; it is projected to be about 50,000 AU from our sun (Kaufmann).
Once in a while a comet will come out of one of these reserves (most likely from the Kuiper Belt) and enter into a highly elliptical orbit around the sun. When a comet approaches the sun, the immense heat of our sun will begin to melt a portion of the comet and sends debris off into space, leaving a trail of small pieces of rock and ice behind. This trail left by the comet, called the meteoritic stream, more or less remains in the original orbit of the comet for a lengthy period of time. These small pieces of debris are meteorites; they range in size from a few millimeters to a few meters across. If they would be any larger, they could be classified as asteroids (Kaufmann).
When the comet...