PREDICTING how spectacular the annual Leonid meteor shower will be, and when it will hit its peak intensity, is fraught with difficulty. Now astronomers think they know why: Jupiter’s gravitational pull stirs up the dust clouds that cause the showers.
The Leonid meteor showers happen every year in mid-November, sometimes producing spectacular meteor “storms” of more than a thousand meteors an hour. The showers are caused by rock and dust that is continuously shed from a comet called 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. This trail of debris is known as the Leonid meteoroid stream.
Every 33 years, the comet makes its closest approach to…
