Expert: Tom Whiting - 10/22/2007

Question
why doe shooting stars shoot?

Answer
Hi Connor,
The terms "shooting star" and "falling stars" are obsolete now.  Back a few centuries ago, men did not know what those streaks of light were, quickly moving across our night skies, so they probably really thought that the bright streaks really were stars, or somehow connected to, or had something to do with..... the stars.
Today we know better....the proper word is "meteor" because
today we know that they have nothing to do with the stars.
They are simply very small bits of space junk hitting our upper atmosphere at speeds of anywhere from 1 to 100 miles per second, and burning up by friction with our upper atmosphere.  (You'd burn up too if you hit the atmosphere at say, 30 miles per second, which is the average velocity for a piece of space dust.)
Most are simply the size of a grain of sand;  a marble-sized
piece produces a bright fireball.  These particles are called
meteoroids before they strike the atmosphere, meteors while
they are giving off light and heat (burning by friction through our atmosphere), and if they very rarely happen to hit the surface of the earth, then we call them meteorites.  Notice that they are only "meteors" for a very short timespan....while coming down through the atmosphere.  So us astronomers try to avoid the terms of falling or shooting stars, and properly call them what they are.....meteors.
Also notice that a body has to have an atmosphere to have
meteors streak, or shoot, across the sky.  The moon, with no
atmosphere, does not see any meteors as the particles slam
right into the lunar surface....something that future astronauts
on the moon's surface will have to worry about, but that's another story.
Hope all this helps,
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie PA