Do shooting stars always leave trails?

Question

I live in Shropshire in the UK, it is 10.45pm and I have just seen a shooting star move across the sky. I watched it for about two minutes, it moved fast in the same direction, is wasn't darting but much faster than any plane. Then it went really really bright and disappeared. It didn't leave a trail in the sky like I thought shooting stars did. Does anybody know what it was likely to be?

Thanks for your help

Becky

Answer 1

If it's made of an ablative material that will succumb to rapid heating to tens of thousands of degrees and the friction caused by passing through a marginally-viscous substance at tens of thousands of miles per hour, then, yes, it'll leave a trail.

Anything that enters the atmosphere will.

Answer 2

No, they don't always leave trails.  I've seen some that did and some that didn't.  If yours really lasted for two minutes, that's far more unusual than the absence of a trail.  Most only last a few seconds.  It must have been much larger than average to last that long.

Answer 3

It was a satellite. What we call shooting stars are meteors, moving between 20 and 70 miles per second, and most are pebble-sized or smaller. They are usually visible for a second or less, with very few being large enough to show for a few seconds before they disintegrate.

Answer 4

I would say that what you saw..was more like a satellite...not a shooting star..or meteorite.

Meteorites..or shooting stars are bits of particles that are left over from a comet that leave a trail of debris somewhere in the orbital path of Earth.  When Earth moves in it's orbit...it goes through these trails of comet debris and the debris burns up in our atmosphere.  They are very fast and don't last very long.

Some meteorites do leave brief trails but even those only last a second or two.

If..what you saw lasted a good two minutes...then...it was more likely..a satellite.

It most likely rotated at just the right angle to face the sun before it disappeared....that's why it appeared to get really bright before it disappeared into Earth's shadow.

Hope that helps you.

Edit:...

Yes...different satellites appear to move at different speeds...depending on how far away they are.