Meteor showers are one of the most frequent and most beautiful astronomical events that can be seen from Earth without using any special equipment. The moment a meteor enters the atmosphere, it starts to burn and leaves behind a bright trace on the night sky, the bigger the meteor, the brighter the trace. One of the most beautiful and most visible meteor showers are the Perseids, which happen each year in the month of August.

The reason for which they are called like that is that the shower seems to form in the Perseus constellation. In fact the Perseid meteor shower is caused by the 109P Swift-Tuttle comet, which orbits the Sun every 133 years. The Earth approaches the comet's orbit every year in the month of August and as such, small rocks that were left behind by the comet enter the atmosphere thus giving birth to hundreds of shooting stars.

Experts say that during the peak of the event, which takes place this year during the night between August 11 and 12, there can be seen as many as 90 to 100 shooting stars every hour, but the number varies greatly depending on how dark the night sky is.

While for ordinary people this is just a beautiful spectacle, for scientists a meteor shower is a great chance to catch a glimpse of how things went back in the time when planets were formed.

According to the National Geographic, Paul Wiegert, an astronomer at Canada's University of Western Ontario said that “[Comets] are interesting because they are extremely old, forming when planets did, and they are unaltered since. With comets, you can observe what went into making the Earth, its original ingredients.”