The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Emirates Astronomy Society, a member of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences, Ibrahim Al-Jarwan, stated that the Earth’s atmosphere is witnessing meteor showers called “the Perseids,” since the period from July 17 to August 24.
He said that the “Pershawyat” is attributed to the constellation “Pershaws”, which the Arabs called “the bearer of Ra’s al-Ghul”. The peak of these showers is on August 12 and 13 of each year, and their number exceeds a hundred meteors per hour.
He pointed out that the meteors shine in the dark nights, in which the bright moon disk is absent, or any artificial lighting or air pollutants that limit the capabilities of monitoring with the naked eye.
Meteors are divided into two main groups: first, “individual or random meteors,” which can be seen at least 5 of them are on normal nights and from different regions and at different times. The second section is “meteor showers”.
Al-Jarwan explained that the main meteor showers are characterized by their occurrence every year at approximately the same time because the Earth returns to the point of intersection of its orbit with the orbit of the comet once every year, and this type is also distinguished by the fact that the meteors of one shower all seem to emanate from one imaginary point called the “radiation point” and it is called a shower. Meteors are referred to as the “star group” that contains the radiation point.
He explained that the Perseids were also named because of the radiation point between the stars of the Perseus group, and each meteor shower has its own radiation point, and the star group is a number of stars that the ancients imagined in the form of a tool or an animal, and in general if the number of meteors per hour reached a thousand meteors per hour or At the time, it was called a meteor storm.
