A shared universe › Blog › The tears of Saint Lawrence · Español
There are a few nights in August when all you need to do is lie down in the dark and wait. Every few minutes, a streak of light crosses the sky. They are the Perseids, and in Spain they have an older name.
The Perseids are not stars. They are grains of dust, almost all smaller than a grain of sand, left behind by a comet called Swift-Tuttle. Every year, in mid-August, the Earth passes through that trail. The grains enter the atmosphere at tremendous speed and burn up: that is what we see.
They are called the Perseids because they all seem to come from the same point in the sky, in the constellation Perseus. The peak usually falls around 12 August.
10 August is the feast of Saint Lawrence, a deacon of Rome who died a martyr in the third century. As the meteor shower arrives every year around that date, people began to call them the saint’s tears. The name explains nothing about the sky, but it says a great deal about how we have looked at it: searching in it for something that had to do with us.
Psychologists who study awe have found that looking at something immense makes us feel smaller and, at the same time, more connected to others. A night of Perseids is one of the simplest ways to feel it, and it is usually better in company.
In A shared universe shooting stars cross the sky too, and on Perseid nights there are more of them. If you are grateful for something that night, you can light a star with “What I’m grateful for”.