The massive meteor shower that convinced people the world was ending
This week’s Geminid meteor shower is expected to be one of the most impressive of the year. According to astronomers, this stellar show — peaking Wednesday night — could produce up to 150 “shooting stars” per hour in white, yellow and even green hues.
As dramatic as that might be, it can’t hold a candle to the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833. On the night of Nov. 12-13, so many meteors burned through the Earth’s atmosphere that they seemed to turn the night sky into morning. Eyewitnesses claimed the air was filled with brilliant “snowflakes,” while newspapers dubbed it “the shower of stars.” In oral histories, Native American tribes referred to it as “the night the stars fell.”
“It appeared so grand and magnificent as to be truly exhilarating,” Joseph Harvey Waggoner, a Pennsylvania teenager, recalled later. “It was a sight never to be forgotten.”
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On the basis of contemporary descriptions, researchers estimate that as many as 240,000 meteors lit up the sky in a nine-hour period that night. In one hour, as many as 70,000 shooting stars streaked across the sky. The brightness of the shower caused countless citizens to rise from their slumber, in turn waking neighbors with loud exclamations of the vivid sight before them.
The spectacular scene had another effect on people: Many believed that it foretold a disaster of biblical proportions and that their lives were all but over.
“The world is now actually coming to an end, for the stars are falling,” exclaimed a Southern farmer who had run outside only in his shirt. As the display increased, he was so terrified that he sought cover under his house — sans clothing — according to the Georgia Journal.
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Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was ecstatic at the sight, believing that Armageddon was imminent. He wrote of that moment:
“I arose, and to my great joy, beheld the stars fall from heaven like a shower of hail stones; 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 was awoken by the sound of screaming. According to an account related by her great-great-granddaughter through family oral history, the White people on the plantation “thought it was Judgment Day” and “started callin’ all the slaves together, and for no reason, they started tellin’ some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers was, and who they’d been sold to and where they took ’em.”
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The Leonids actually occur every fall and are caused by debris from the 55P/Tempel-Tuttle comet as it passes. Most years, the shower is only moderately remarkable, with about 10 to 15 meteors per hour.
However, every 33 years, the comet’s elliptical orbit brings it closer to the Earth and Sun, producing a celestial “storm” in spectacular style. This cyclical display has happened for millennia; ancient Greek astronomers wrote about it, noting its location in the Leo constellation. In 902 AD, Chinese observers described it as the night “stars fell as rain.”
While traveling across South America in 1799, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt witnessed the display, recording, “Thousands of fireballs and falling stars fell in a row for four hours, often with a brightness like Jupiter. Long smoke trails were left behind.”
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Despite all that, the 1833 Leonids seem to have caught the United States unawares. (The event was visible in most of North America.) At the time, meteor showers and storms were not widely understood as scientific phenomena. Astronomers of that era did not even know they were often produced by comets — another misinterpreted celestial occurrence.
Instead, most people turned to religion for answers. Smith is believed by some to have prophesied the meteor shower. In the fall of 1833, the Mormon leader was speaking in Ohio when he encountered a skeptic. In response, Smith is said to have uttered, “Forty days shall not pass, and the stars shall fall from heaven.” According to church elder Parley P. Pratt, that revelation came true on the 40th day, Nov. 13.
Smith recalled that he was awoken at 4 a.m. to watch the star show. He was mesmerized by what he saw, writing about “long trains of light following in their course [that] resembled large drops of rain in sunshine. These seemed to vanish when they fell behind the trees, or came near the ground. Some of the long trains of light following the meteoric stars, were visible for some seconds; these streaks would curl and twist up like serpents writhing. The appearance was beautiful, grand, and sublime beyond description.”
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Although the end times never arrived, the Leonid meteor shower gave rise to the birth of modern meteor astronomy. Scientists studied the 1833 event to understand its cause. Yale professor Denison Olmsted researched it extensively, even using newspapers to request observations from the public. In 1834, he published his findings in the American Journal of Science and Arts, hypothesizing that meteors came from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
When the storm occurred again in 1866 — although not at the same intensity — scientists began to speculate that a comet could be the cause. The responsible comet had actually been discovered the year before by Wilhelm Tempel and Horace Parnell Tuttle, after whom it is now named.
In 1888, one of the most famous artworks depicting the 1833 meteor shower was printed in “Signs of the Times,” a magazine of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It shows people in a country village looking in awe at a night sky filled with countless streaking lights. The drawing and a subsequent engraving based on it were created from the recollections of Waggoner, the Pennsylvania teenager, who later became a church minister.
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Living in Switzerland 55 years after the meteor shower, Waggoner told the artist Karl Jauslin what he had seen that night. He recalled “the stars falling at all points of the compass at once” and said they “continued to fall without any diminution of numbers until the dawn of day obscured them.”
Waggoner knew no artwork could truly do justice to the incredible spectacle he had witnessed, writing 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. This time, we’ll be better prepared.
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