Sixth Grade
Worksheets
The Geminids Meteor Shower
Caption: Photo by Pete Lawrence on spaceweather's website taken on December 12-13, 2009
There are several meteor showers each year that can be seen at certain times. A meteor shower is when a number of meteors make streaks of light in the same part of the sky. This happens when many meteors pass through Earth's atmosphere at about the same time.
Each of these meteors is tiny - most are about as big as a grain of sand. What makes them visible to us is their speed. Falling through Earth's atmosphere, each particle travels at about 22 miles per second--more than 79,000 miles per hour! As they pass through Earth's atmosphere at this speed, they burn up. We see a streak of light across the sky.
