Shooting stars, meteorites and other flying things
A lot of people think that asteroids, meteorites, shooting stars and comets are the same thing, but they are not. They are all very different and this is what we will try to explain here!
Comets
A comet is a ball of ice and rock that comes from the colder regions of the solar system.They believed to come from the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
Shooting stars (Meteors)
A shooting star is the trail of light that we see when a meteoroid burns up in Earth's atmosphere. Meteoroids are the bits that are left behind by a comet.
Meteorites
When a shooting star is too big and it doesn't burn up completely, the remains reach the Earth's surface and then they are called meteorites.
Asteroids
Asteroids are lumps of rock that were created from the early solar system, about 4.6 billion years ago. You can mainly found them in the Asteroid Belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter.
