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John Bochanski wrote an article tilted The Next New Meteor Shower,Astronomers confirm that debris from Comet 209P/LINEAR should create a sky show on May 24, 2014 on November 12, 2013 that is one of the most detailed I've read so far. Here are some excerpts from it. "Most meteor showers ... occur when Earth plows into the debris trail left behind by a comet. The comet throws this debris off as itÂ’s heated by the Sun, but while all comets heat up as they enter the inner solar system, many do not have orbits that intersect with EarthÂ’s. ......

A surprise meteor shower spotted in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" dropped by an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27). The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short. The bits of debris appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun very...

The number of car-to-house-sized meteoroids whizzing through the Earth’s neighborhood is about 10 times higher than Earth-based telescopic surveys suggest, a new study reveals. That finding, reported online August 28 and in an upcoming Journal of Geophysical Research–Planets, comes from analyses of recently declassified data on infrasonic waves in the atmosphere detected between November 1960 and April 1972. The network of instruments collecting the data was originally designed to detect low-frequency sound waves produced by aboveground nuclear tests, says Elizabeth Silber, a planetary physicist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. But during the 13-year period, the instruments...

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved. The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these...