KUWAIT: The Perseids meteors shower is expected to be visible in Kuwait on Friday evening and Saturday, Astronomer and historian Adel Al-Saadoun. It will be the clearest meteors shower seen in over a hundred year, Saadoun said yesterday. Hundreds meteors can be seen per hour. He said that these meteors are the dusty debris of Comet Swift-Tuttle that approaches the Sun once every 120 years, and when it travels away, it leaves debris and gases behind.

When the Earth approaches the waste, it attracts them. Saadoun noted that the Perseids meteors enter the Earth atmosphere at a speed of 59 kilometer per second, and gets burnt at about 80 kilometers from the planet surface. A meteors shower is a spike in the number of meteors or 'shooting stars' that streak through the night sky. Most showers are spawned by comets. As a comet orbits the Sun, it sheds an icy, dusty debris stream along its orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, one sees a meteor shower.

Although the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, if one traces their paths, the meteors in each shower appear to 'rain' into the sky from the same region. Meteor showers are named for the constellation that coincides with this region in the sky, a spot known as the radiant. For instance, the Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus. - KUNA