Perseid meteor shower and its “dark” side

This year 2025 will reach its peak between August 12 and 13, they are among the most beautiful of the entire year, they are also in summer, so the weather, the night is pleasant to be able to see them, not like in winter when it is cold, except in the southern hemisphere, of course and also this year it seems that they are going to be intense.

There can be up to 100 shooting stars per hour, which are normally the size of grains of sand, but occasionally there is a fragment that is a little larger, for example, one the size of a tennis ball already has the power to leave a dazzling trail of light and the larger it is, obviously the more flash it generates, this is because these fragments collide with the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of up to 59 km/sec.

The resulting friction quickly vaporizes the remains, creating those bright flashes that we see as fiery, shooting stars. They are called that because they seem to emanate from a point in the constellation of Perseus and specifically a point close to the star Etaperssei.

The Perseid meteor shower occurs each year as the Earth travels through the wake of ancient fragments shed by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which is one of the large comets in the solar system. At 26 km in diameter, this comet is about twice the size of the asteroid that is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Comets travel faster than asteroids, so the kinetic energy of this comet in the event of an impact would be much greater, but don't worry, comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle is not a threat to the Earth, for now, because there is something obvious, if our planet crosses the trail of this comet, it is because the path of the comet and that of the Earth intersect, and this makes the comet currently considered the most dangerous known cosmic object for the Earth, since which has the capacity to cause mass extinction and will reduce humanity to a handful of survivors living underground on an uninhabitable planet for surely millennia.

Comets are much more powerful and would be much more destructive than Apophis or any other known asteroid that can be potentially dangerous, and there is a forecast that it will crash into the Earth in 4479, this comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle takes around 133 years to complete its orbit around the Sun, its last approach to the Earth was 1992 and the next will be in the year 2125. Initial calculations indicated a probability of impact small, but a probability. However, more recent studies have shown that the comet will not collide with Earth.

It will pass about 7.5 million kilometers from us and from the start it will leave an amazing spectacle with its remains. It is still dangerous because comets have the habit of breaking up as they pass near the sun, they heat up, their ice sublimates, sometimes causing very violent eruptions and breaking off not so small pieces, not what we see in star showers, but sometimes pieces of hundreds of meters long, especially a comet as big as this one.

So it could be that this comet passes 7.5 million kilometers from us, but that it drags large fragments around it, 100 meters or more, one 100 m would be enough to destroy a large city, although it is to be expected that by the 45th century humanity, if we have not become extinct before, will already have the means and resources to defend itself from any comet. They may even take advantage of it, for example, to bring water to Mars or Venus.

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