Officials from around the world were quick to call for greater vigilance in monitoring meteors.
In its journey through space, Earth is bombarded by a hailstorm of comets, meteors and asteroids.
Stargazers under this kind of night sky might see 30 or more meteors per hour.
In the far distant past, immense meteorites meteors that slam into Earth likely contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs.
Meteor watchers can expect to see 60 to 200 meteors an hour streak across the sky, NASA said.
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After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt and you will begin to see meteors.
Scientists have charted about 500 meteors near the Earth's orbit and estimate that 100 of those are potentially dangerous.
Astronomers usually expect about 20 meteors per hour during the Lyrid shower, with outbursts as high as 100 meteors per hour.
Meteors are a prime example of a worry-inducing event: vividly imaginable, highly publicized, novel, undetectable in advance, uncontrollable, potentially catastrophic, involuntary.
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Though meteors from Halley's Comet can be seen at this time of year, he said it did not come from the comet.
At least two meteors broke up and collided into a zinc factory in the city outskirts, part of its concrete wall in shambles.
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Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin called for leading world powers to create an early-warning system, and consider technology to shoot down meteors.
At its peak intensity this weekend, the shower is expected to generate about 16 meteors per hour in a dark sky, Cooke said.
While the supermoon is expected to outshine the fainter Eta Aquarid meteors, NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke predicts that some bright fireballs may be visible.
Our atmosphere provides little protection against meteors larger than a truck.
Where is the foolish bloviation, the press conference meteors, the egomaniacal insults that the poor New England Patriots will hear in their nightmares until next September?
In a nice touch, the meteors are reported to be slowing down before impact, which means that somebody, or something with feet, is hitting the brakes.
However, the detection efforts have been less successful for smaller meteors still capable of causing major loss of life and damage, such as the one over Russia.
Raining meteors down on the approaching horde is also great.
By comparison, meteors of the type that hit Russia originate at the earliest reaches of time in the disk of gas and dust that swirled around the early sun.
The nuclear test monitors pick up "infrasound", or low frequency, waves from about 20 meteors a year -- "if conditions are right, perhaps as small as a pea, " she said.
Only 10% of meteors more than 150 yards wide -- dubbed "potential city killers" by Holdren -- have been detected, meaning more than 10, 000 are out there without our knowledge, he said.
While the Delta Aquarids are visible from all over the globe, viewers in the Southern Hemisphere tend to get a better show because the meteors appear to radiate from the sky's southern reaches.
Using NASA's WISE infrared satellite, astronomers estimate there are about 5, 000 known meteors that can impact the Earth with sizes of about 100 feet or larger -- that is, larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor.
For example, nobody knows where the moon's weak, erratic magnetic field came from: was the moon bombarded by magnetic meteors, or did it once have its own strong internal magnetic field that has decayed over time?
Early research involved a colleague lying in a deckchair in the night-time open air with a piece of string to measure the meteors, while he observed electromagnetic signals on a cathode-ray tube in a nearby hut.
If asteroids as big as DA14 pass close to Earth once every decade or two, and meteors as large as the Chelyabinsk one impact once every 100 years (a similar meteor having caused the Tunguska event in 1908), the chance of both events happening on any one day are indeed very small: 1 in 3, 650 days times 1 in 36, 500 days, or about 1 in 100 million -- not odds you would bet against.
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