A meteor is a solid extraterrestrial body moving rapidly near the Earth’s surface. Most meteors disintegrate, and most of those don’t before they reach the ground. When a meteor enters the atmosphere, it becomes a fireball, a shooting star, or a falling star.

Falling stars are interplanetary material falling through a planet’s atmosphere and are highly luminous.

They’re known as shooting stars but aren’t stars at all. Meteors have nothing to do with outer space. Only objects from outer space can be called “stars,” so shooting or falling stars must be from asteroids, comets, meteoroids, etc.

A meteor gets its luminosity by compressing the air in front of it. When they enter the atmosphere, meteors are surrounded by a bright white cloud called a “train.” The train is formed when the meteor’s passage compresses atmospheric gas along its path. These clouds are usually long and have been observed to reach over 180 kilometers.

As the cloud dissipates, a fading “tail” often forms as the object continues to fall toward the ground. The duration of these clouds can range from under one second to several minutes, depending on how high up they are. Most meteors last less than a second. Often when you see a meteor, it only makes one quick pass through the sky. The slowest fallers can take several seconds to move across the sky.

Meteors move fast, typically over 10 kilometers per second (22,000 miles per hour). This enormous speed causes them to disintegrate high up in the atmosphere. They don’t even start falling until they are at least 50 miles high. The majority of them are no bigger than a grain of sand, which is why they don’t usually make it to the ground.

Typically, meteors that survive their descent through the atmosphere become very hot and either melt or burn up entirely before reaching Earth’s surface.

These sightings of phenomena in the night sky are called meteor showers. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the path of a comet. Comets are debris left over after planetary formation, and some comets orbit more than one star. The center of each comet contains ice which vaporizes as the comet nears the Sun. This gas and dust debris go along for the ride in different-sized chunks or particles.

When the Earth passes through this debris, it encounters tiny particles moving quickly (22,000 miles per hour), called a meteor shower. These usually only occur in the early mornings during late spring and summer when Earth moves along its orbit intersecting comet debris. Meteor showers are named after the constellation where they appear to originate.