Comets: where meteor showers come from

42 comets that matter to meteors and meteorites: the parents of the great meteor showers, the comets visited by spacecraft, the great comets of living memory and the three visitors from other stars.

A comet is a lump of ice, rock dust and carbon-rich material, usually a few kilometres across, left over from the birth of the planets. Most spend their lives far beyond Neptune, in the Kuiper belt or the much more distant Oort cloud. When one falls in towards the Sun, its ice turns to gas, which carries dust off the surface. The gas and dust form the glowing head, or coma, and the tails, which can stretch for millions of kilometres.

The dust does not vanish. It spreads along the comet's orbit as a stream of grains, most smaller than a grain of sand. Where that stream crosses Earth's path, our planet runs into it on the same dates every year, and the grains burn up in the upper atmosphere as a meteor shower. That is why the Perseids come every August and the Leonids every November. A few showers come from bodies that look like asteroids, such as Phaethon, the parent of the Geminids, which are probably burned-out or broken comets.

Comet grains are fragile and fast, so they burn up completely; no meteorite has ever been linked to a meteor shower. Meteorites come from asteroids. Yet the boundary is blurred: the dust brought back from Comet Wild 2 contains minerals like those in chondrite meteorites, and some asteroids still hold ice.

No comets match that search.

Meteor showers and their parents

The parent bodies of 45 of the 80 showers described on this site are known or suspected. The rest are still a mystery: their parents may have broken up long ago or are yet to be found.