NASA Debunks Perseid Meteor Shower Rumor
By Samantha Mathewson, Space.com Contributor | August 9, 2017 11:27am ET
There is a striking misconception going around that the 2017 Perseid meteor shower will be the "brightest shower in recorded human history" and even visible during the day.
This rumor is not true, according to NASA.
Long-awaited celestial events, such as the annual Perseid meteor shower on Aug. 12 or the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, create a lot of excitement. However, many rumors about these events get blown out of proportion, as is the case with this year's Perseids, NASA said. [Top 10 Perseid Meteor Shower Facts]
"For one thing, the Perseids never reach storm levels (thousands of meteors per hour). At best, they outburst from a normal rate [of] between 80-100 meteors per hour to a few hundred per hour," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "The best Perseid performance of which we are aware occurred back in 1993, when the peak Perseid rate topped 300 meteors per hour. Last year also saw an outburst of just over 200 meteors per hour."
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