Enlarge / The Geminids put on quite a show each year. (credit: NASA.gov)

Each year, skywatchers get to gaze at the spectacle of the Geminids streaking through the night sky from mid-November through late December. However, this meteor shower is highly unusual, and not only because it is one of the easiest to view.

Meteor showers usually originate from comets that fly close to the Sun. Comets are made of frozen gasses, dust, and rock, and the Sun’s heat vaporizes some of that gas and releases it into space, dislodging debris that eventually falls to Earth. But the Geminids are exceptional because they originate from an asteroid instead of a comet. Asteroid 3200 Phaeton is the source of this trail of debris, but asteroids are not affected by solar heat the same way as comets, so it’s unclear why Phaeton has left a trail of debris.

NASA scientists who analyzed data from the space agency’s Parker Solar Probe have now finally found the most likely answer to the mystery of how the Geminids formed: a catastrophic event. “The Geminids may have formed via a more violent, catastrophic destruction of bodies that transited very near to the Sun,” the scientists said in a study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal.