The Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833

Awe Inspiring Meteor Storm

The Leonids meteor shower is one of the 10 biggest meteor showers of the year. Every 33 years, however, it becomes even more intense as the comet 55P/Temple-Tuttle makes its closest approach to the Earth and Sun. The Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833, however, was unusually prolific and became one of the most spectacular astronomical sights ever seen in the modern era, with many people believing that the world was coming to an end. It also occurred at a time before electric street lights had been invented, and the Moon had set in the early evening providing North America with an unobstructed view of the sublime celestial phenomenon.

Needless to say, the story was picked up in various newspaper reports as the “night the stars fell”, with the following description of the Wall family’s experience giving an insight into thoughts and feelings of witnesses at the time. As the report written by Bruna McGuire and Betty Wall explains:

“The stars showered down so thickly and fast that it looked as though every star in the heavens was falling. When they touched the ground, they burst and drifted away. Stars were still falling when the Sun arose the next morning. Never before had there been such a sight witnessed, nor has there been since the greatest meteoric display of our age.”

The Leonids in History

From a purely historical perspective, the Leonid meteor shower is one of the oldest known. In the year 902 AD, Chinese astronomers described the night “stars fell as rain”, with the event also picked up by observers in Egypt and Italy. Much later, anecdotal records from 1630 recount tales of unusually large numbers of meteors two days after the funeral of Johannes Kepler, which many authorities of the time saw as a “salute to Kepler from God”.

Other accounts of unusually large numbers of meteors during the month of November include those from 1799, when German scientist Humboldt and his companion reported the sighting from what is now Venezuela, over which it was said that a similar event had occurred in 1766. As Humboldt stated:

“…thousands of fireballs and falling stars fell in a row for four hours, often with a brightness like Jupiter. Long smoke trails were left behind.”

Discoveries Post-1833

Following the Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833, American astronomer Denison Olmsted drew attention to the fact that no celestial phenomenon has ever occurred in North America “since its first settlement, which was viewed with so much admiration and delight by one class of spectators, or with so much astonishment and fear by another class.”

The really strange thing about the Leonids meteor shower is that while ordinary citizens were aware of the fact that it occurred in cycles, this simple fact had eluded scientists until Olmsted started an investigation that year concerning the origin of the meteors, and wrote a comprehensive report about his findings. In the process, Olmsted also overturned a 2,000-year-old doctrine developed by Aristotle that held that meteors were the fiery sparks of the remains of enormous gas bubbles that rose into the air, before exploding high above the ground.

When Olmsted observed the Great Leonids Meteor Storm of 1833, he noticed that they appeared to originate from a fixed point in the constellation Leo, which made him realize that the meteors were entering the atmosphere from outer space. Using this observation as his point of departure, he calculated the meteors’ speed to be about 6.4 km/sec, which he thought was really, really fast, but which later turned out to be too slow by a factor of more than ten. Nonetheless, using simple trigonometry, Olmsted calculated the altitude at which the meteors became visible to be between 50 and 80 km, which turned out to be largely correct.

Calculating the size of the glowing meteors, however, presented Olmsted with something of a thorny problem. The role of friction in astronomy was largely uncharted territory in the early 1800’s, but using available knowledge, Olmsted’s calculations suggested that each meteor was up to about 1.6 km in diameter, as opposed to the tiny grains of dust that we now know meteors to be.

While Olmsted’s findings up to this point are interesting, his most important realization broke new scientific ground. Olmsted concluded that since the meteors were coming from outer space, their ultimate origin must be the disintegration of a body that periodically passes Earth relatively closely, and which leaves a trail of debris behind at each passing. Thus, as Earth moves through the trail of debris during its orbit around the Sun, the particles enter Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in spectacular 

https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-great-leonids-meteor-storm-of-1833/