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Stargazers were in for a treat last week as the Perseid meteor shower lit up the sky between August 11 and 13. However, have you ever wondered if Earth ever goes through a meteor shower? Yes! The meteor wind often appears as a meteor shower on our planet. As NASA has explained, most meteors are sand-sized debris that has escaped from a comet or asteroid in solar orbit. This debris continues in an elongated orbit around the Sun. “Encircling the Sun itself, our Earth can move through a stream of debris in orbit, where it can appear, over time, as a meteor wind,” says Nasa.

Surprisingly, these meteor showers that light up the sky are the destroyed ones. However, its streaks can be traced back to a single point in the sky known as the radiant. The US space agency has shared an image of the meteor shower that took place over two days in late July near the ancient Berber village of Zriba El Alia in Tunisia. The South Delta Aquariids meteor shower was suspected to originate from comet 96P Machholz. A southern delta aquarida comes from the direction of the constellation Aquarius: it is radiant in the southern part of the sky. Meteors tend to fly at 25 miles per second.

Last week, the Perseid meteor shower lit up the northern sky. It was one of the best meteor showers to appear from mid-July to the end of August each year. According to NASA,

The Perseids are caused by debris clouds (pieces of ice and rock) left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle that passed close to Earth in 1992. They peak when Earth passes through the densest, dustiest zone.

Note that the Delta Aquariids radiate from the vicinity of the constellation Aquarius, while the Perseids fly from the constellation Perseus, which is in the northeastern part of the sky.