How do comets create meteor showers on Earth?

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Comet Comet McNaught with filamentary tail and the Moon over the Pacific Ocean, photographed from Paranal Observatory, Chile, January 2007.

Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through streams of debris left behind by comets as they orbit the Sun.123

As a comet approaches the Sun, solar heating causes its volatile ices to vaporize. This process releases embedded dust and larger grains—typically up to 1 cm in size—which remain in orbit along the comet's path, forming what is known as a meteor stream.23

When Earth’s orbit intersects one of these dust-populated paths, the debris enters our atmosphere at high velocities. As these particles burn up, they create the streaks of light observed as meteors. Because the debris is concentrated in a specific stream, the meteors appear to radiate from a single point in the sky, and the increased frequency of these sightings is what we define as a meteor shower.234