Britannica Sources used in this answer

How is the Eta Aquarid meteor shower connected to Halley’s Comet?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Illustration showing the eight planets of the solar system in order from the Sun-Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune-depicted to scale by size, with labeled diameters in miles and kilometers. The Sun is partially visible on the left for comparison. — Solar system The planets (in comparative size) in order of distance from the Sun.

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is caused by Earth passing through a stream of debris shed by Halley’s Comet over millennia of its orbit around the Sun.1

As comets travel near the Sun, solar heating causes their volatile ices to vaporize, releasing dust and larger grains that remain in space along the comet's orbital path. When Earth’s orbit intersects this trail of cometary debris, the particles enter our atmosphere and burn up, creating a meteor shower.234

Because these particles are distributed along the orbit of Halley’s Comet, Earth encounters this debris stream annually, resulting in the Eta Aquarid shower in May and the Orionid meteor shower in October.1