Meteor showers on Earth are caused by streams of meteoroids hitting our atmosphere. These meteoroids bits of rock that were once released from their parent comet. Comets can produce debris by water vapor drag. As a comet orbits the Sun it sheds an icy, dusty debris stream along its orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Although the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, if you trace their paths, the meteors in each shower appear to “rain” into the sky from the same region.
We always wonder how the meteor shower work and also where and how do the originate. This visualization tracks their path and origin and also the day of the month it will occur.This new 3D experience offers a great way to understand the journey of the meteoroids and the sources of meteor showers on Earth. All major meteor showers are mentioned in this visualization. The different functionality like viewing the meteoroid shower from the earth or following the earth in its orbit, provided in this visualization helps the user understand the actual dynamics of a meteoroid shower and also tracks the time of occurrence.
This visualization shows these meteoroid streams orbiting the Sun, some stretching to the outer regions of the solar system. It lets you select the meteor shower in the menu to see the corresponding meteoroid stream in space.
Visualization: Click Here
Note: Their meteoroid orbits are based on those measured by NASA’s CAMS video camera surveillance network and were calculated by meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
Reference: Click Here