What Are Shooting Stars?
If you look up at the sky on a clear night, you may see a “shooting star” flash across the sky, but they are not stars. Shooting stars are bits of space matter called “meteors.”
Most are no bigger than grains of sand. Billions of meteors zip through space.
Many are captured by earth’s gravity, and are pulled toward earth. As the meteors whiz through the earth’s atmosphere, friction causes them to burn white hot. Then we see them as blazing trails of light.
Meteors usually burn up long before reaching the ground. Those that survive their fall and land on earth are called “meteorites.”