Leonid meteors: Australia to be showered in colourful lights at '70 kilometres a second'

The Leonid meteor shower will peak on Sunday, with up to 15 meteors an hour expected to grace the night sky.

Michael Dahlstrom
·Environment Editor
Updated ·2-min read
A person watching a green meteor in the sky.
The Leonid meteors are often brighter and more colourful than regular shooting stars. Source: Getty

Look up this weekend and you might just catch a glimpse of something remarkable. Faster and more brilliant than regular shooting stars, the Leonid meteor shower is making its annual return.

Monash University astronomer Associate Professor Dr Michael Brown said Aussies can expect to see different colours streaking across the sky. “The colour reflects the composition of the meteor. So depending on what elements you have in the grain of dust that hits the atmosphere, you'll see that in the colours of the meteor,” he told Yahoo News.

While you might be able to spot the odd meteor now, the shower’s peak is expected to be November 17 and 18. It’s then you can expect to see up to 15 an hour.

  • Most Leonid meteors are between 1 mm and 1 cm in diameter.

  • While most meteors don't make a sound, hissing sounds have been reported with some larger ones.

  • During the 1833 storm, there were reports of 100,000 meteors an hour. And in 1966 thousands hit in 15 minutes.

A burst of Leonid meteors in 1999, in a photo taken by the Leonid Multi Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid MAC).
A burst of Leonid meteors was photographed at 11,582 metres in 1999. Source: NASA/Ames Research Center/ISAS/Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano

The Leonid meteor shower, as its name suggests, will appear as it is coming away from the constellation Leo. Brown suggests using a phone app to locate it in the sky, and watching from a place with as little light pollution as possible, ideally in the early hours of the morning.

“They come in at 70 kilometres a second, so we can get some really bright meteors,” Brown said.

The Leonid shower is caused by the dust trail from the comet Tempel-Tuttle. “So each year, when Earth passes through the comet’s orbit, we get a meteor shower,” Brown said.

Those of us lucky enough to have witnessed the 2002 Leonid storm remember seeing clusters of bright green meteors streaking across the sky. But this year won’t be as brilliant because storms like that only occur every 33 years when the Earth passes through a dense part of the dust trail.

The next storm will be in 2035.

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