Each meteor comes from a piece of interplanetary debris which burns up as it crashes into Earth s atmosphere around 70 times faster than a bullet.
Most meteoroids are fragments of debris left in the wake of a comet, forming a meteor stream .
As our Earth moves around its orbit it occasionally crashes into a meteor stream to give a meteor shower . Each meteor shower is named after the constellation from which the meteor stream seems to appear. The most reliable meteor showers are the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December. These showers have peak rates of between 60 and 100 meteors each hour. When a comet passes the sun it refreshes the meteor stream with new debris.