The Leonid meteor shower appears to originate in the constellation Leo (Illustration: SkyTonight.com) On 19 November, Earth’s orbit will intersect a debris stream left behind by Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1932 (Illustration: J Vaubaillon)
Sky watchers in western Europe and Africa, northeastern North America and Brazil may get a brief treat this weekend with the height of the Leonid meteor shower.
The meteors are expected to reach peak intensity around 0445 GMT on Sunday (2345 EST on Saturday). The most intense part of the shower will last only a few hours.
Under dark skies, people may spot about 100 to 150 meteors per hour, making the Leonids one of the best showers this year. But it will pale in comparison to meteor showers from 1998 to 2002, when observers counted thousands of meteors per hour.
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The reason for the difference is that every year around this time, the Earth passes through a different trail of debris left behind by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle on its passage through the inner solar system every 33 years. Over time, pressure from sunlight segregates the dust and rocks in these trails into separate groups.
In 1998, Earth encountered a very rocky stream, which led to bright fireballs in the sky. This year, however, Earth will encounter a dustier trail of debris that was shed by the comet in 1932 – and that dustiness will translate to fainter meteors.
From Earth’s perspective, the meteors appear to originate from the constellation Leo, hence the name Leonids. But the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, so meteor experts suggest leaning back and taking in as much of the night sky as possible.
There should not be much moonlight to interfere with observing the Leonids this year, so meteor watchers will just have to hope for clear skies over the weekend.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
