Giovanni Schiaparelli
The Milan astronomer who showed in 1866 that the Perseid meteors follow the orbit of a comet.
Key facts
- Born
- 1835
- Died
- 1910
- Nationality
- Italian
- Field
- Astronomer
Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli directed the Brera Observatory in Milan for nearly forty years. He is best known to the public for his maps of Mars, on which he drew a network of lines he called canali, meaning channels. Mistranslated as canals, the word fed decades of speculation about Martians, although the lines turned out to be an illusion.
His most lasting scientific discovery concerned meteors. In 1866 Schiaparelli worked out the orbit in space of the Perseid meteors, the shower that appears every August. He compared it with the orbits of known comets and found that it matched almost exactly the path of Comet Swift–Tuttle, which had been seen in 1862.
This was the first proof that meteor showers come from comets. As a comet travels around the Sun, it sheds dust and small grains, which spread out along its orbit. Each year, when Earth passes through that stream, the grains strike the atmosphere at high speed and burn up as shooting stars. Soon afterwards, other astronomers linked the Leonids to Comet Tempel–Tuttle in the same way.
The tiny grains of meteor showers are far too fragile to reach the ground. Meteorites, by contrast, come mostly from asteroids. Schiaparelli's work helped separate those two stories, which until then had been tangled together.