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Asked by eshanip1017 to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 14 Mar 2014.
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Deepak Kar answered on 14 Mar 2014:
No, they are not stars, but meteorites lighting up when they travel through the earth’s atmosphere, burning up 🙂
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Francesca Day answered on 14 Mar 2014:
Shooting stars happen when meteorites (rocks travelling through space) enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up, giving off lots of light. So it looks like a moving star, but it’s not really a star at all!
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Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 14 Mar 2014:
That’s right, they are two different things.
Normal stars are like our Sun, but so far away they look like faint dots of light.
A shooting star starts as a microscopic piece of rock going around our Sun. If it enters our atmosphere, it is travelling so fast that friction with the air burns it up in a flash of light.
Most people call that flash of light a shooting star, but the proper scientific name is a meteor.
If any of it lands on the ground we call it a meteorite, but that is very rare.
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Nick Wright answered on 16 Mar 2014:
That’s right! Shooting stars are actually asteroids that have collided with the Earth. When they hit us they are travelling very fast and so they generate a lot of friction with our atmosphere as they pass through the atmosphere. This friction heats the asteroid up causing it to glow and appear briefly like a bright star, hence the reason why we call them ‘shooting stars’. Have you ever see a shooting star?
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