Observing the Sky: Other Celestial Bodies - Meteors

The Sun, Moon, stars, and planets are all regular features of our night sky. There are other objects in the sky that we see for just a few seconds, weeks, or months. These include meteors, the aurora, and comets.

Sometimes called "shooting" or "falling stars," meteors are not stars at all, but simply flashes of light we see in the sky. They start out as meteoroids, small pieces of rock often no bigger than a grain of dust cruising through space. These tiny objects get pulled toward the Earth by its gravity. When they pass through the Earth's atmosphere, friction between the rock and the atmosphere heats the meteoroid until it burns up. (This is the same friction that warms your hands when you rub them together.) The brief streak of light we see is usually the end of that little piece of space dust. A meteoroid large enough to survive its trip through the atmosphere to hit the surface of the planet is called a meteorite, and the hole it leaves in the ground is a crater.

Many meteors come from the debris dropped by comets as they passed near the Sun. This debris continues to orbit the Sun, and as the Earth passes through it each year, we have meteor showers.

The best meteor showers with about 100 meteors visible per hour are the Perseids, which occur on August 12, and the Geminids, which occur on December 14. These showers are named for the constellations from which the meteors seem to come.