How to see the year's best meteor shower tonight

Right now the best shooting star show of the year is happening: the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. People have been viewing this annual event pretty much as long as we’ve been recording history. But what are we really looking at when we gaze up to see these faint streaks of light shoot across the sky? And what can you do to get the best view of them? We dive into those questions on this edition of Spacing Out, which also gets into the latest news about the Sun and the tea behind the SpaceX rocket crashing into the moon. Interested in more space news? Let us know! Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here, and it's time for my favorite time of the month, our space news segment, Spacing Out with Gina. But Scott's here, like he always is.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  As always.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he is my co-mastermind of the series. He's also an All Things Considered host. Welcome back to our show, Scott.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  It's been too long since we talked space. And by too long, I mean--

• 0:44Speaker 01

  A month.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  A month, yeah.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I don't know how many souls that is on Mars.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And this time, the first time, we've had, like, somebody come back on our Spacing Out segment. Ari Daniel, welcome back.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  I was caught in your gravitational pull.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  We're both impressed. So impressed.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Did I get a point for that? Do I have to come back again?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. And I bet you're going to be our first third guest, too, because, you know, you're going to want to come back. Have fun with us. So I'm going to talk about space, obviously. And the nice thing about this segment is we can talk about anything in the universe. But actually, for this one, we're going to stay pretty local. We're going to stay within our solar system, very close.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  We'll keep it local, in the neighborhood.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And our first story is about the beautiful display that is the Perseid meteor shower. Have either of you seen the meteor shower?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  You know, I have tried over the years, and I've had limited success. One year, I was in a really great setting to see it, and it was a little overcast, and I was sad, but it cleared just in time--

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  --that I felt like I could get just enough. But I would love to see more.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  I haven't seen them. I've seen other stellar phenomena and seen planets through telescopes.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  But that's something that is on my list.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I was a kid, and I got too cold.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  There is that.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  We were in the desert. OK, I have another question for you. This is very important. What is the favorite thing, then, that you have seen that's very celestial, very spacey, here from Earth? Because I'm assuming neither of you went to space before.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  I feel like I would have mentioned it in this segment.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  It would have come up.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  It would have come up.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  I got to say, if we're counting it, the solar eclipse a few years ago--

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  --just like, just a great day in my life.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I watched it. I went over to my kid's school. All the kids came outside. We all had our little glasses. It was just like a really great day, even though DC wasn't in the full path. It was enough that it was really cool and memorable.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  I have also, at one of my kids' schools, we did a nighttime viewing event with telescopes. And I looked through the eyepiece of one of the telescopes, and there was Saturn.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're like, what?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  It was like, it was like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time. It was exactly what I thought it should look like, a little circle with the rings going around it.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  You saw the rings?

• 2:57Speaker 03

  But it was Saturn. That, for me, it was like--

• 3:00Speaker 01

  You're like--

• 3:00Speaker 03

  --you know, it confirmed something that's out there.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like those pictures weren't lying.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, today on the show, space, but we're staying local. We are talking about the Perseids. We're also talking about a new, more refined understanding of the sun's surface and what's up with the SpaceX rocket that hit the moon just days ago. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:56Speaker 01

  OK, Scott, we're going to maybe start with the Perseids?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  The Perseid meteor shower peaked Wednesday night. Let's start with the basics. What exactly are meteor showers?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Right, so I just want to say real quick, there was a new moon yesterday, so the skies were really dark, great for stargazing. But Scott, as an astronomer, I think it's fascinating that meteor showers are basically like the Earth traveling through a field of debris left over by comets, or in some cases, asteroids.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  That is why the Perseids happen around the same time every year. Earth is orbiting the sun, as you know, Scott, and this is just the part of our path when we intersect with that leftover trail from the comet Swift Tuttle.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  I appreciate your confidence in my, in my space knowledge there. One thing I don't know, though, and I've actually always wanted to know, is when did humans first figure out that these shooting stars that show up every year are actually from comets?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's start with, like, just meteor showers in general, because, like, I spoke with Matt Shindel, a planetary science historian with the Smithsonian. He says that the Perseids were first recorded in 36 A.D. in the Han Dynasty of ancient China.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  People have been observing meteor showers for as long as people have been recording history.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  But it wasn't until the mid-1800s, when astronomers started figuring out that comets might be the cause of meteor showers.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Huh. And help me visualize this a little bit more. When we're talking about debris from a comet, is this like, like little bits and pieces that flaked off as it zoomed through space?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so people are seeing those tiny bits of comet debris burn up in our atmosphere.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  Keep in mind, like, the things that you're seeing are incredibly small. Like, most of this debris is only about the size of a grain of sand. You know, that itself is pretty impressive, that this little thing burning up in our atmosphere is making, putting on such a big show.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Give me some tips here. If I want to see them, what do I need to do right?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  So, Scott, leave town. Get away--

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Get out of here.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Get away from the city lights. Yeah, and then, once you're in the dark, let your eyes adjust. This is really important, for about 20 to 30 minutes. Then you should be able to see those faint streaks of light across the sky, those shooting stars. Almost all meteor showers are best observed after midnight, so bring a blanket, lay down, look up, but set your expectations for no more than one minute. It's not going to be like Star Trek, you know, like raining down.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Not warp drive, zooming by.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Just a singular sparkle every minute.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  OK. Let's turn to the topic of the surface of the sun, which I will just say, we talked about this very early on, that I had not yet read the book Project Hail Mary. I'm now actually reading the book as we speak, so the surface of the sun, high in my mind.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  OK.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Let's talk about it.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  So we've known, Scott, that the sun creates enormous amounts of energy in its core. The surface of the sun, which is this boiling brew of hot and magnetized charged particles, plays a key role in transporting that energy out into space.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  So it's like, it's like a giant cup of hot ionized coffee?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  You said it. Now, the new results, published in the journal Nature, come from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the most powerful instrument we have to look at the sun.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So researchers were able to visualize the solar surface at a resolution of almost 12 miles? That's like seeing an ant on the ground from 100 miles away. Like, so check out these images that came out in this study.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Do you have them up on your computer?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  I do. They're right here.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Let me see. Whoa!

• 8:28Speaker 03

  And I've even got a video--

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I can show you.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It's so cool.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Let me see the video.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, here comes the video.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It's like active. Like, you can literally see the sun, you know, moving, changing.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Whoa!

• 8:40Speaker 02

  It looks like, it looks like, um, like amoebas or something that are in a microscope almost. And it's, it's, or like a kaleidoscope. It's beautiful.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Like astrophage.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  It's really, it's really stunning. We are looking at the swirls and pulses of plasma on the surface of the sun. David Kuridza, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, and a co-author of the study, was blown away by what he saw.

• 9:06Speaker 06

  We immediately realized that we had something very, very special. The surface of the sun is much more dynamic, much more finely structured.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  In particular, David and his colleagues noticed that when different layers of plasma move past one another at different speeds, they generate subtle disturbances that grow into large swirling vortices. This turbulence happens on the edges of magnetic features on the sun's surface, which are pretty much everywhere.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I love the magnetic fields. And also, scientists have long predicted these instabilities, and this is the first time they've been observed.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  I don't know how you feel about it, Regina, but I feel like it's almost more exciting to me sometimes when scientists confirm factually something that was long theorized.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Than, than a totally new discovery. Because if somebody thought about something, they had no idea if it was actually true, and it turns out it is.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yes, agreed, agreed.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So, any sense yet what this might mean for our understanding of the sun?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Well, first, this could help explain a pretty big mystery. Why is the corona, the outermost halo of the sun, so much hotter than the surface? And second, these vortices may help fuel explosive solar events.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  So like coronal mass ejections, right? Like these, these solar storms that kind of come towards Earth. They are created by these twisted up magnetic fields. And this kind of solar weather can affect satellites and power grids. So this discovery opens up a new avenue of exploring how the sun creates and transports energy to its surface and sometimes towards Earth.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Last topic, this is something I saw a lot of headlines about, and I had a bunch of questions. Is that piece of SpaceX rocket that smashed into the moon? Is this common?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the moon has been hit by a bunch of stuff over the billions of years it's been around, mostly meteors, natural stuff. That's why there are so many craters, Scott.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Right, which we saw in those beautiful pictures from Artemis II earlier this year.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. But less frequently do human-made things hit the moon. However, when lunar missions end, like some of the Apollo missions, the spacecraft parts are intentionally, like, smashed into the moon. This SpaceX crash on August 5th was not one of those.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  What happened?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  It was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that was launched in January 2025, and it took two landers to the moon. SpaceX says the upper rocket was supposed to be left in space, but things didn't go as planned.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  So scientists tracked this rocket part and alerted everyone months in advance that, yes, it's gonna hit the moon. They figured out the date and the location.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  I mean, this, this still doesn't sound great, though, an unintentional crash.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that the headlines of this crash seem to make people think that, but...

• 11:46Speaker 07

  One person's junk is another person's treasure. Here, scientists love things hitting the moon.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  That's Brett Denevy, a lunar scientist, who will be working on the future Artemis missions to the moon.

• 11:58Speaker 07

  When I saw the headline that there was gonna be something hitting the moon, and we knew when and where, I was excited. That's great.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Scientists can use these impacts to study the lunar material that gets shot out during these collisions, which can tell them more about how the moon got all these ancient lunar craters and how the moon was made.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  I mean, this, this makes me think about this growing problem around Earth, right? The space junk just circling the planet more and more of it, especially as we talk about more and more things being sent to the moon.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. There are tens of thousands of satellites in orbit around Earth, and they have to actively maneuver to avoid debris, which shortens how long they can be used.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  But there are global agreements on how to safely manage these satellites. I talked with Ian McCray, a space physicist who studies space debris in the UK. And he said that right now, most large debris is tracked. But he warned that as more companies, like you said, around the world start putting more satellites into low Earth orbit, things might get worse.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Scott, Ari, thank you so much for helping me space out today, because I needed it.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  We'll see you next month. We'll do it again.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Can't wait, if I'm invited.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  You, you are.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  You made that gravitational pull joke. You're invited.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Great. I'm in perpetual orbit.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Space out.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps the show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever else you're listening from, so you'll never miss a new episode. This was a bonus episode that you got on a Thursday, so follow us. We're giving you presents. This episode was produced by Jeff Pierre and Arun Nair. It was edited by Amina Khan, our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and Patrick Jaren Watanabe.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Gina and I checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez, Ted Mebane, and Hannah Glovna were the audio engineers. I'm Ari Daniel.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And I'm Regina Barber.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. See you Monday.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Or Friday, if this goes on Thursday.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  See you Friday. See you tomorrow.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  See you soon.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  See you soon.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, there, thank you.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  We're gonna see you eventually.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  See you very soon.

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