Meteor Shower This Week

I saw a few of the Geminid meteors this week. But that reminds me of the question as to why there are meteor showers at the same time each year.

A meteor shower occurs when the earth, in orbit around the sun, passes through a cloud of dust in space. Most of the dust is leftover from comets passing by. The meteors are particles of dust burning up in the atmosphere.

But for the earth to pass through the same cloud of dust year after year it must mean that it is stationary, while the earth is moving. The question is how this can be. The particles of dust have mass and must be at the same distance from the sun as the earth. So then why aren't the particles in orbit around the sun just like the earth? Particles should orbit just as planets do. The rings of Saturn are small pieces of ice in orbit around the planet.

My theory is that orbits require some kind of compression to have taken place. The lightest and first atoms in the universe were hydrogen atoms, which have just one proton and one electron. Hydrogen atoms are very light and low density, with the electron orbiting far from the proton.

If the only atoms in the universe were hydrogen there would be masses drawn together by gravity. But there would be no such thing as orbits and escape velocity would be essentially zero. 

Stars are born when enough mass is brought together by it's mutual gravity to overcome the repulsion between atoms caused by electrons having a negative charge and their mutual like charge repulsion. This compresses lighter atoms into heavier ones. The new larger atom contains less internal energy than the ones that were crunched together to form it. This is why stars shine, because the energy is released as radiation.

This compression that takes place by fusion in stars is what creates orbits. The new and heavier atoms, brought about by fusion in stars, has almost as much mass, minus that which was released as radiation, as the many lighter atoms that were crunched together to form them, but occupy far less space. The orbit, of one condensed mass around another, is the "ghost" of the much greater space that the atoms of the two masses occupied before being condensed by fusion into heavier atoms.

The dust that makes meteors has undergone some condensation by fusion or it would be hydrogen and helium, the original elements of the universe, and not the elements of which dust is composed. We know that the sun is a second generation star, because it contains heavier elements that are beyond it's current stage in the fusion process of fusing four hydrogen atoms into one of helium. The previous star was much larger than the sun. When it exploded in a supernova part of the mass fell back together by gravity to form the sun and planets.

But my theory is that there was at least one nova, a blasting away of the outer layers of the previous star, before the star exploded from the center in a supernova. These nova, nowhere near as powerful as the supernova, fused atoms in the outer layers of the star into molecules, but not into new atoms. These molecules make up comets, and the dust that they leave behind. This explains why the orbits of comets around the sun is completely out of harmony with the planets.

I believe that there was likely three nova that preceded the supernova in the previous star, each from a lower starting point than the one before it because they were blasting off the outer layers of the star. The first likely formed the distant comets of the Oort Cloud. The second formed the nearer Kuiper Belt. The third formed most of the giant outer planets, other than their rocky and metallic cores. But I am certain that there was at least one nova.

The former star, before exploding in a supernova, was in orbit around the center of the galaxy and the clouds of dust in space that cause meteors continue that motion because they were part of a nova, but not of the supernova so they are not in orbit around the sun, although they share the motion of the sun around the center of the galaxy. Due to the supernova the dust has undergone less condensation by fusion than the sun and planets. That is why the earth has predictable meteor showers.

We have seen this before. In the compound posting, "Our Solar System" October 2022, section 5) WHY THERE ARE METEOR SHOWERS explains this in more detail.

Near the end of the year another section of that compound posting that might be of interest is 3) THE SOLSTICE GAP.

The solstice occurs on December 21 or 22. The earth is closest to the sun on January 4. Since rock and land are heavier than water the northern hemisphere of the earth is heavier than the southern hemisphere. So it would create a more balanced state if the two coincided but there is a two week gap.

The reason for the gap is that the orbit of the earth around the sun is not a circle, it is an ellipse. The spin of the earth, that causes day and night, and the change in the tilt of the axis is constant but the earth moves faster when it is closer to the sun. The opposite solstice is around June 21. The earth covers more distance, because it is moving faster, from December 21 to June 21 than from June 21 to December 21.