What happened on the night everyone thought the world was ending?

It is certain that the Geminid meteor shower is one of the most impressive events of the year. According to astronomers, this star show, which will reach its peak on Wednesday night, could produce up to 150 "shooting stars" per hour in shades of white, yellow, and even green.

THE NIGHT THE STARS FELL

However, no matter how dramatic this meteor shower may be, everyone, biased or unbiased, agrees that it cannot compete with the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833. On the night of November 12-13, 1833, so many meteors passed through Earth's atmosphere that the night sky looked as if it had turned into morning. While eyewitnesses claimed the air was filled with bright "snowflakes," newspapers called it a "star shower." Native American tribes called it "the night the stars fell" in their oral histories.

According to details reported in Chip, researchers estimate, based on accounts from that time, that as many as 240,000 meteors illuminated the sky over a nine-hour period that night. Within a single hour, as many as 70,000 shooting stars appeared in the sky.

The brightness of the meteor shower caused countless citizens to wake from their sleep, and they, in turn, woke their neighbors by shouting loudly while watching the live spectacle before them. This magnificent scene had another effect on people: Many believed it heralded a catastrophe of biblical proportions and that their lives were coming to an end.

A Southern farmer, who ran outside in only his shirt, shouted, "the stars are falling now and the end of the world is coming." According to the Georgia Journal, he was so frightened as the event escalated that he headed to take shelter under his house without his clothes.

Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was very happy at this sight, believing that the apocalyptic battle against the wicked was near, and described those moments as follows: "I arose, and to my great joy beheld the stars fall from heaven like a shower of hail; it was a literal fulfillment of the word of God, as recorded in the holy scriptures, as a sure sign that the coming of Christ is close at hand."

In Tennessee, an enslaved girl named Amanda Young woke up to the sound of screams. According to an account passed down through her great-grandson's family oral history, the white people on the plantation "thought it was Judgment Day" and "began to gather all the slaves together and, for no reason, began to tell some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers were, who they had been sold to, and where they had been taken."

WHAT IS THE LEONID SHOWER AND WHY DOES IT OCCUR?

Leonids actually occur every autumn due to the debris left behind by the 55P/Tempel-Tuttle comet as it passes. However, most of the time, this meteor shower, which consists of about 10 to 15 meteors per hour, is not extremely remarkable.

However, the comet's elliptical orbit brings it close to Earth and the Sun every 33 years, creating a magnificent celestial "storm." This cyclical show has been happening for thousands of years. Ancient Greek astronomers also wrote about this meteor shower and noted its position in the constellation Leo. In 902 AD, Chinese observers described it as the night "stars fell like rain."

German scientist Alexander von Humboldt witnessed this meteor display while traveling through South America in 1799 and wrote, "Thousands of fireballs and shooting stars fell in succession for four hours, generally with the brightness of Jupiter. They left long trails of smoke behind."

Despite all this historical presence, the 1833 Leonids seem to have caught the US off guard. At that time, meteor showers and storms were not widely understood as a scientific phenomenon. Astronomers of that era did not even know that they were mostly produced by comets (another misunderstood celestial event).

That is why most people turned to religion for answers. However, although the expected doomsday did not arrive, the Leonid meteor shower led to the birth of modern meteor astronomy. Scientists studied the 1833 event to understand its cause. Yale professor Denison Olmsted researched the subject extensively, even using newspapers to request observations from the public. In 1834, he published his findings in the American Journal of Science and Arts and suggested that the meteors originated from beyond Earth's atmosphere.

ANOTHER SHOWER IN 1866

When the storm occurred again in 1866, though not with the same intensity, scientists began to speculate that the cause might be a comet. The responsible comet had been discovered a year earlier by Wilhelm Tempel and Horace Parnell Tuttle, from whom it now takes its name.

In 1888, one of the most famous works of art depicting the 1833 meteor shower was printed in the Seventh-day Adventist Church's magazine, "Signs of the Times." This work shows people in a village gazing in awe at the night sky filled with countless streaks of light. The drawing and the engraving based on it were created based on the memories of Joseph Harvey Waggoner, a Pennsylvanian who saw the meteor shower during his youth and later became a church pastor.

Fifty-five years after the meteor shower, Waggoner, who was living in Switzerland, described what he saw that night to artist Karl Jauslin. He recounted that "the stars were falling at the same time in every point of the compass" and said that "they continued to fall without any diminution in their numbers until the dawn of day hid them from sight."

Waggoner knew that no work of art could do justice to the incredible sight he had witnessed, and wrote in the magazine accompanying the illustration: "Any representation on paper must, at best, give a very limited idea of the reality."

Scientists expect the next major meteor storm of the Leonids to occur in 2033 or 2034.