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A "falling star" or a "shooting star" has nothing at all to do with a star! These amazing streaks of light you can sometimes see in the night sky are caused by tiny bits of dust and rock called meteoroids falling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. The short-lived trail of light the burning meteoroid produces is called a meteor.
If you have ever seen a "falling star", you were actually seeing a meteor. Most of the original object burns up before it strikes the surface of the Earth. Any leftover part that does strike the Earth is called a meteorite. A meteorite can make a hole, or crater, in the ground when it hits it. The larger the meteorite, the bigger the hole.
A meteoroid is a piece of stony or metallic debris which travels in outer space. Meteoroids travel around the Sun in a variety of orbits and at various speeds. The fastest meteoroids move at about 42 kilometers per second. Most meteoroids are about the size of a pebble. When one of these pieces of debris enters the Earth's atmosphere, friction ...
And the answer is... True. A meteoroid travels in outer space. A meteoroid heats up as it falls through the Earth's atmosphere. As it heats up, it glows. This is known as a meteor, or a "falling star". Go to Imagine the Universe! (A site for ages 14 and up.) The StarChild site is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive ...
14. What space object is called a falling star? 15. How much of the solar system's mass is contained by the Sun? 16. What is the name given to storms on the Sun's surface? 17. How long would it take to count the stars in the Milky Way? 18. TRUE or FALSE: The Galaxy "Did You Know?" page tells us that star collisions occur every 25 years. 19.
The Earth bulges out at its equator, and the gravitational attraction of the Moon and Sun on the bulge provided the "nudge" which made the Earth precess. It was the ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus who first estimated the precession of the Earth's axis around 130 B.C. The period of precession is about 26,000 years.
However, calculations showed that a star powered on chemical energy would only last maybe a thousand years or so. In the mid-1800s two physicists, Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, put forward the idea that the huge weight of the Sun's outer layers should cause the Sun to gradually contract.
How can I buy a star? [March 1999] Can you tell me about Space Camp? [April 1999] What are constellations? [May 1999] Can you tell me about the other solar systems being discovered? [June 1999] Will an asteroid hit the Earth? [July 1999] What causes a "falling star"? [August 1999] What makes the Sun shine? [September 1999]
Do stars last forever? No. Stars are born, live, and die. This process is called the "life cycle of a star". Most of the time a star shines, it is in a stage of its life cycle called the main sequence. How long it stays in the main sequence phase depends on how much mass the star has. Very big stars have a lot of mass to use as nuclear fuel to ...
Fireballs are really just big meteors - the result of meteoroids falling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. The rock that caused the "Chicago Fireball", as the March 2003 event has been called, was probably a small space rock about 1 or 2 meters wide. As it fell into the atmosphere, it heated up and eventually broke up into about 500 ...
