What are “shooting stars”?
How are shooting stars made and how often do they occur during the night? There are many little chunks of rock present in space. Their sizes range typically from the size of a grain of dust to the size of a golf ball (the latter being more impressive in the night sky, but also more rare). As the Earth moves around the Sun, it will run ito some of these small rocks that collide with the atmosphere at great velocities. Going through the atmosphere they begin to heat up, start to glow, and then burn down. This is what we see when we look at a shooting star (which we call a meteor). There are millions of such particles colliding with the atmosphere every day (I mean day and night). But since you can only see them at night, and you can only look at a small part of the sky at once, when stargazing you can expect to see a shooting star every 10 to 15 minutes. This is on a regular night. When we get meteor showers, we get many more. A meteor shower happens when the Earth goes through a region
Says Kevin Luhman, what they most likely were seeing was the peak of the Lyriad meteor shower, an annual event occuring in mid-to-late April. Though folklore of many cultures describes shooting or falling stars as rare events, theyre hardly rare or even stars, says Luhman, Penn State assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics. From the dawn of civilization people have seen these streaks of light that looked like stars, but were moving quickly across the sky, he notes. These shooting stars are actually space rocksmeteoroidsmade visible by the heat generated when they enter the Earths atmosphere at high speeds. These bits of ice and debris range in size from a speck of sand to a boulder. Larger objects are called asteroids, and smaller, planetary dust, Luhman explains. Most meteoroids are about the size of a pebble and become visible 40 to 75 miles above the earth. The largest meteoroids, called fireballs or bolides, explode into flashes so bright they can be seen during the day,
Shooting stars are meteors, or space rocks and dust. They burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating a bright streak as they burn up. Passing comets often leave behind trails of dust and other material in their wake. The Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun at a speed of about 67,000 miles per hour. When the Earth encounters these microscopic bits of dust, they hit the atmosphere at tremendous speed and burn up instantly. We see meteor showers when Earth passes through clouds of debris left by various comets. They tend to happen at predictable times each year because Earth passes through those clouds at the same point in its orbit – corresponding to dates on our calendar.
