What is a shooting star/falling star?
First of all, it is not a star! We prefer to call them meteors. A meteor is the bright flash of light that you see when a piece of space rock is vaporized by the heat of friction as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. The meteors you see are typically travelling more than 100,000 miles an hour, and vaporize about 60 miles above the ground. Most meteors are tiny, the size of pebbles, and are quite harmless. Occasionally, a piece comes along which is large enough that a portion remains intact all the way to the ground. The resulting rock is called a meteorite.
