Shooting stars, also known as falling 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. These are called Meteoroids.
Because they move so fast, this causes them to heat up and glow as they move through the atmosphere. The trail of light that the burning meteoroid produces is called a Meteor. Most meteoroids burn up in the atmosphere before they reach the ground, however, once in a while, a meteoroid is large enough than some of it survives and reaches Earth’s surface. Then it is called a Meteorite.
It happens that there are many little chunks of rock present in space, with sizes typically ranging from the size of a grain of dust to the size of an African star apple (agbalumo), and some as large as rock boulders. As the Earth moves round the Sun, and passes through the path of a comet (this is because a comet also orbits near the sun), it will run into some of these small rocks that collide with the atmosphere at great velocities, and 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 meteor (which we call a shooting star).
There are millions of such particles colliding with the atmosphere every day, and if you are a star gazer, you can expect to see a shooting star every 10 to 15 minutes. In any given night, you can see more shooting stars (in fact about twice as many) just before dawn.
At certain times of year, you are likely to see a great number of meteors in the night sky. These events are called meteor showers, and these showers are given names based on the constellation present in the sky from which they appear to originate. For example, the Leonid Meteor Shower, or Leonids, appear to originate in the Constellation Leo.
It is important to understand that the meteoroids (and therefore the meteors) do not really originate from the constellations or any of the stars in the constellations, they just seem to come from that part of the sky because of the way the Earth encounters the particles. Hence, associating the shower name with the region of the sky they seem to come from just helps astronomers know where to look.
Some of the brightest and most popular meteor showers are the Leonids, the Geminids, and the Perseids, and with some of these showers, you can expect to see more than one meteor (or shooting star) each minute!
And that’s all the deets on shooting stars, – oh pardon me! – meteors.
