Perseid Meteor Shower 2025
This year, the Perseid meteor shower will be active from mid-July to mid-August, reaching its peak on 12 August
Meteors are often called shooting stars, though the bright streaks you see in the sky don’t have anything to do with stars.
In fact, what you’re wishing on are tiny particles of dust – leftovers from the birth of our solar system – vaporising in Earth’s atmosphere.
What causes a meteor shower?
Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through streams of tiny pieces of debris – meteoroids – left behind by comets and asteroids. The peak of a meteor shower is when we see the highest rate of meteors. This happens as we pass through the densest part of the debris stream.
Most comets are composed of dust and ice,“a big, dirty snowball”.
“As comets orbit the Sun, the ice sublimes [changes from a solid to a gas] and the trapped dust is swept out into a tail behind them.”
Nearly all meteors are tiny dust particles, about the size of a grain of sand travelling at tens of kilometres per second through space.
“As they come out of the vacuum of space and into Earth’s atmosphere, that little dust grain interacts with all the particles and ions in the atmosphere. It gets heated up by the friction and forms the impressive flash that we see,”
“The Earth isn’t close to the comet – it’s just passing through some of the dust it left behind.”
At other times of year, you may still see meteors in the sky, but only about one every 10 minutes. These sporadic meteors, as they are known, will come from random directions.