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Eta Aquariid Meteor Shower
May 10 , 2024
11 days
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- The Eta Aquariid meteor shower, which has been active since April 15, was peak on May 5 and 6.
- It is comprising burning space debris moving at speeds of around 66 km per second (2.37 lakh kmph) into Earth’s atmosphere.
- These showers are seen in May every year.
- The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is known for its rapid speed. This makes for long, glowing tails which can last up to several minutes.
- They are visible to countries such as Indonesia and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.
- Meteor showers come from comets, which are frozen leftovers from the formation of our solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago.
- Comets are composed of dust, rock and ice, and orbit around the Sun in highly elliptical orbits.
- In some cases, they take hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
- According to NASA, a total of 3,910 comets are currently known.
- Billions more are theorised to be orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort cloud.
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