Thus, as Earth moves through the trail of debris during its orbit around the Sun, the particles enter Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in spectacular meteor showers. Olmsted concluded that since the meteors were coming from outer space, their ultimate origin must be the disintegration of a body that periodically passes Earth relatively closely, and which leaves a trail of debris behind at each passing. While Olmsted’s findings up to this point are interesting, his most important realization broke new scientific ground. The role of friction in astronomy was largely uncharted territory in the early 1800’s, but using available knowledge, Olmsted’s calculations suggested that each meteor was up to about 1.6 km in diameter, as opposed to the tiny grains of dust that we now know meteors to be. Nonetheless, using simple trigonometry, Olmsted calculated the altitude at which the meteors became visible to be between 50 and 80 km, which turned out to be largely correct.Ĭalculating the size of the glowing meteors, however, presented Olmsted with something of a thorny problem. Using this observation as his point of departure, he calculated the meteors’ speed to be about 6.4 km/sec, which he thought was really, really fast, but which later turned out to be too slow by a factor of more than ten. When Olmsted observed the Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833, he noticed that they appeared to originate from a fixed point in the constellation Leo, which made him realize that the meteors were entering the atmosphere from outer space. In the process, Olmsted also overturned a 2,000-year-old doctrine developed by Aristotle that held that meteors were the fiery sparks of the remains of enormous gas bubbles that rose into the air, before exploding high above the ground. The really strange thing about the Leonids meteor shower is that while ordinary citizens were aware of the fact that it occurred in cycles, this simple fact had eluded scientists until Olmsted started an investigation that year concerning the origin of the meteors, and wrote a comprehensive report about his findings. Long smoke trails were left behind.” Discoveries Post-1833įollowing the Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833, American astronomer Denison Olmsted drew attention to the fact that no celestial phenomenon has ever occurred in North America “since its first settlement, which was viewed with so much admiration and delight by one class of spectators, or with so much astonishment and fear by another class.” “…thousands of fireballs and falling stars fell in a row for four hours, often with a brightness like Jupiter. Other accounts of unusually large numbers of meteors during the month of November include those from 1799, when German scientist Humboldt and his companion reported the sighting from what is now Venezuela, over which it was said that a similar event had occurred in 1766. Much later, anecdotal records from 1630 recount tales of unusually large numbers of meteors two days after the funeral of Johannes Kepler, which many authorities of the time saw as a “salute to Kepler from God”.

In the year 902 AD, Chinese astronomers described the night “stars fell as rain”, with the event also picked up by observers in Egypt and Italy. Never before had there been such a sight witnessed, nor has there been since the greatest meteoric display of our age.” The Leonids in Historyįrom a purely historical perspective, the Leonids meteor shower is one of the oldest known. Stars were still falling when the Sun arose the next morning. When they touched the ground, they burst and drifted away. “The stars showered down so thickly and fast that it looked as though every star in the heavens was falling. As the report written by Bruna McGuire and Betty Wall explains: Needless to say, the story was picked up in various newspaper reports as the “night the stars fell”, with the following description of the Wall family’s experience giving an insight into thoughts and feelings of witnesses at the time.

Starfall calendar october 2018