What is a shooting star?

Shooting stars are tiny meteors that glow white hot when they hurtle from out of space into the earth’s atmosphere. 

If you look up at the sky long enough on a dark, clear night, you may see the fiery streak of a “shooting star” flash across the sky. 

Shooting Star

While “shooting star” may be a pretty name, it is not accurate, for real stars are great glowing balls of gases far out in space.

The “shooting stars” that streaks across the sky are bits of rock and metal called meteors.  Many billions of meteors zip around through space.

Many of them come so close that they are captured by earth’s gravity, and are pulled toward earth.  As the speeding meteors hurtle into the earth’s atmosphere, friction with the air causes them to glow white hot.  Then we see them as blazing trails of lights.

Meteors rarely blaze for more than a few seconds.  Most of those we see were originally no bigger than a grain of rice.  They usually burn up before they reach the ground.

Meteors that survive their fall and land on earth are called meteorites.-Dick Rogers

Where Does Dust Come From?

Dust

Housekeepers spend a good deal of time dusting.  Dust settles from the air and makes a gray coating over everything around us.  

Dust is more that just specks of dirt.  In the ordinary dust you could collect from a windowsill, you would find tiny chips of rock, bits of dead wood and dried leaves.  

Dust may also have in it spores from plants, pollen from the powder in flowers, spot from smoke, cinders left from meteors burning up on their way to earth, and other bits of matter that float in the air.  Dust may drift hundreds of miles before finally setting because of gravity.-Dick Rogers