Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Night the Stars Fell Down

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the early morning of November 13, 1833, one of the greatest astronomical spectacles in recorded history took place. It was seen by millions of people, and no one was sure exactly what was happening. Some thought it was the end of the world or judgment day. Both common people and scientists recorded the event, and it turned out that the explanation for what happened was just an extraordinary occurrence of a very ordinary event. Learn more about the night the stars fell down on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. I'm into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow. Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow. That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. If you ever spent an evening looking up at the

Starting point is 00:01:35 night sky, there's a good chance you might have seen a shooting star. Shooting stars are very brief. They may only last a second or two, but they light up the sky. And they're infrequent enough that in some cultures, when you see one, you're told to make a wish. If you're very fortunate, you might be able to witness several of them per minute. Those of you who have seen a shooting star firsthand will probably have a greater appreciation for the events I'm about to describe in this episode. And for those of you who haven't seen one, I can only recommend going out some evening when the sky is dark and seeing one for yourself. The event I'm going to be describing in this episode is fundamentally the same as when you see a shooting star. Except it was many,

Starting point is 00:02:16 many, many orders of magnitude bigger. The event in question began on the evening of November 12, 1833. As night set in over the southern and eastern United States, people were witnessed to what we would call today a meteor shower. There were multiple shooting stars going off each minute. Not a lot, but more than average and enough to be noticeable. Certainly nothing to record for posterity and to be worth doing a podcast about almost 200 years after the fact. However, as the evening progressed, something changed. The number of shooting

Starting point is 00:02:49 stars in the sky increased dramatically. Most people went to bed, but by about 3 a.m., something remarkable was happening. There were shooting stars everywhere. The entire sky was filled with shooting stars. Agnes Clerk, a 19th century astronomer, later described the events of that night. She said, quote, the sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers were quite beyond counting, but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed on the basis of that much diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall, end quote.

Starting point is 00:03:37 Rooms were lit up even though it was the dead of night. People who witnessed this began waking up everyone in their homes and all of their neighbors to witness the site. There were an estimated 30 to 50 shooting stars per second that could be seen, each of which left a bright streak in the sky. No one had ever seen anything like this before because, as far as we know, nothing like this had ever happened before. There were later reports of this event which came from as far north as Canada, as far west as

Starting point is 00:04:07 Missouri and as far south as Jamaica. People may have saw it over a much larger region than even that. Historical figures of the era, such as Franklin Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, all later recalled witnessing the event. Harriet Tubman later said, what she saw that evening gave her the inspiration to always follow the North Star to freedom. Native people witnessed the event and thought that it was a sign. The Lakota people used the event to reset their calendar. The Pawnee people had been astute observers of the sky for centuries and had noted a pattern in meteor showers. They were one of the few people on Earth who were actually expecting what happened. Members of the Cheyenne tribe killed a white buffalo that night during the meteor storm

Starting point is 00:04:48 and then signed a peace treaty on its skin. Many people thought that there was some religious significance to the event. A group of Mormon refugees in Clay County, Missouri was witness to what happened. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, noted in his diary that he thought it was quote, a literal fulfillment of the word of God, and thought that it was a sign that the second coming of Jesus was at hand. Many people thought that the meteor shower was the literal end of the world or judgment day. This was due to a passage in the book of Revelations, which describes the opening of seals at the end times. In particular, Revelation 6 verse 13 says,

Starting point is 00:05:24 quote, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind." End quote. The United States was in the middle of a movement at a time known as the Great Awakening. It was a Protestant religious revival that made people exceptionally aware of end-time prophecies. What was interesting was the response of many slave owners having witnessed the event. One man in Missouri, who was going to be sold at a slave market the next day, was instantly freed when his captors saw the lights in the sky. Perhaps the best tale came from a woman named Amanda Young, who was enslaved.

Starting point is 00:06:00 at the time. She was probably only eight years old when it happened, but her story became part of an oral history that was passed along in her family for generations. Her great-great-granddaughter, the genealogist Angela Walton Raji, recounts the story that her great-great-grandmother passed down using the language that she would have spoke at the time. Quote, someone in the quarter started yelling in the middle of the night to come out and look up at the sky. We went outside, and there there was a fallen everywhere. Big stars coming down real close to the ground, and just before they hit the ground, they would burn up. We was all scared. Some of the folks was screaming, and some was praying. We all made so much noise the white folks came to see what was

Starting point is 00:06:40 happening. They looked up, and then they got scared too. But then the white folks started calling all the slaves together, and for no reason they started telling some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers was, and who they had been sold to and where. The old folks was so glad to hear where their people went. They made sure that they all knew what happened. You see, they thought it was was judgment day. End quote. There's a lot to unpack in that story, but the slave owners knew that they had done something wrong and sought to make amends when they thought that the end was near and they would be judged on their actions. It was, of course, not the end of the world. In the days that followed, reports began appearing in newspapers all over the country. No one was really sure what happened.

Starting point is 00:07:24 This wasn't the sort of thing that astronomers usually paid attention to because meteor showers were so brief and random that they were difficult to study. One man, an American scientist by the name of Denison Olmsted, took it upon himself to figure out the mystery. He gathered newspaper clippings in accounts of the events in the weeks following. It was one of the first known examples of what we would call crowdsourcing. He found that it wasn't observed in Europe, so it wasn't something that was global in nature. He also found that the shooting star seemed to have originated somewhere in the constellation Leo. By January of 1834, not even two months after the events in question, he sent his findings to the American

Starting point is 00:08:03 Journal of Science and Arts. He speculated that the meteors were a cloud of particles in space, and what everyone witnessed was the Earth passing through the cloud. His paper was the beginning of meteor science. Others continued what Dennis and Olmsted started and figured out more about what happened in 1833. It turns out that regular people had been documenting meteor showers for centuries, and there was a pattern to how they appeared. What we know today is that the 1833 event was an extreme version of an annual occurrence known as the Leonid Meteor Shower. Every year around November 17th, give or take a few days, an above average number of meteors will appear in the night sky. Every 33 years, however, there is an uptick and activity with exponentially heavier meteor showers.

Starting point is 00:08:51 The 1833 event was one such case. A few years after the 1833 event, astronomers discovered the 33-year cycle and predicted that another major event would occur in 1866, and that is exactly what happened. The 1866 event wasn't nearly as strong as the 1833 event, but there were hundreds of meters that could be seen in each minute over the skies of Europe. The reason for the 33-year cycle has to do with the interactions of the orbit of the Comet Temple Tuddle. As the comet passes the orbit of the Earth, it leaves a cloud of dust behind it. The stronger meteor showers are the result of when the comet crossed the orbit of the Earth,

Starting point is 00:09:30 potentially centuries earlier. For example, the 1866 meteor shower was a result of the 1733 comet. Olmsted was right about what shooting stars were. We now know that a shooting star is caused by a meteoroid, which is a rocky object in space entering the Earth's atmosphere to become a meteor. The vast majority of meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, which is why they burn up so quickly. They burn up because of their incredibly high speeds and the friction from hitting the Earth's atmosphere. If a meteor is large enough to make it all the way to the surface, it is then known as a meteorite. The night the stars fell down was most famously used as an inspiration almost a century later for the song titled Stars Fell on Alabama, written by Frank Perkins,

Starting point is 00:10:15 with lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. Stars fell on Alabama, and has been considered one of the standards of popular music in the 20th century, and it's been recorded by dozens and dozens of artists, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Billy Holiday, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Mel Touré, Hercet, Harry Connick Jr., and many, many others. The Night the Stars fell down was a singular event that was remembered by everyone who experienced it. Now that we know the pattern and the cause of it, we are able to predict when the next major meteor showers will occur on the 33-year cycle.

Starting point is 00:10:50 So set a reminder in your calendar for November 17, 2034. If you are in the right part of the world, with clear skies, you might be able to witness one of the most spectacular shows in the heavens. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Roonar over on Podcast Republic. They write, love it, been listening since March and join the Completionist Club today. I drive passenger trains in Southeast Norway.

Starting point is 00:11:23 It's just great listening to this podcast while sipping a good cup of coffee while the sun rises and the day starts. Thaksal do ha, Runa. I'm honored to be able to keep you company while you're transporting the good people of Norway every day. By the way, if you stop by the Oslo chapter of the Completionist Club later this year around Christmas, we will be serving Ludifisk. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Night the Stars Fell Down

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