What is a Shooting Star?
A shooting star is not actually a star, nor does it shoot. A shooting star is officially called a meteor, a chunk of extraterrestrial rock pulled into the Earth’s atmosphere by gravity. Most meteors are closer to dust or sand in size, not the large boulders frequently seen in science fiction movies. As these tiny fragments of rock fall through the Earth’s outer layers of air, they experience a build-up of frictional heat. The individual particles glow brightly as they continue to fall and burn up. Observers on the ground may catch a fleeting glimpse of the shooting star as it streaks across the night sky. It is easy to see how the shooting star earned its nickname. We’re accustomed to seeing fixed points of light in the night sky, commonly known as stars and planets. What we’re not so accustomed to is observing one of these points of light falling out of place or suddenly burning out. When we see a meteor heat up and streak across the sky, it often looks like a real star dropping out o
Shooting stars look like stars that quickly shoot across the sky, but they are not stars. A shooting star is really a small piece of rock or dust that hits Earth’s atmosphere from space. It moves so fast that it heats up and glows as it moves through the atmosphere. Shooting stars are actually what astronomers call meteors. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere before they reach the ground. However, once in a while a meteor is large enough than some of it survives and reaches Earth’s surface.
