FactSentinel

Shooting stars are not stars at all. The bright streaks of light seen in the night sky are caused by meteoroids, which are small pieces of rock and metal, typically ranging from the size of a grain of sand to a pebble. When one of these particles enters Earth's atmosphere at speeds of roughly 25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour, it compresses the air in front of it and heats it intensely. The resulting glow, along with the vaporizing material, produces the brief flash of light known scientifically as a meteor.

The scale of real stars makes the claim impossible. Even the smallest stars are hundreds of thousands of times more massive than Earth, and the Sun is about 109 times wider than our planet. A star approaching Earth would not appear as a fleeting streak lasting a second or two. It would destroy the planet long before reaching it. The stars visible at night are also trillions of miles away, and they remain in place night after night, which would not be the case if they were regularly falling.

The misconception likely persists because of the name itself, which dates back to a time before astronomers understood what meteors were. Most meteoroids originate from comet debris or fragments of asteroids, and meteor showers such as the Perseids occur when Earth passes through trails of this material. Nearly all burn up high in the atmosphere. Those that survive and reach the ground are called meteorites.