What is a shooting star exactly?

Question

...I wonder if it's some sort of light speed travel in which case the star is not technically shooting...or maybe it is shooting and what made it shoot like that?

Answer 1

Bad Company.

Meteorites that mankind has seen time and time again to smash into their Mother Earth

only 5000 years ago there was a 3 mile wide shooting star that crashed in the Indian ocean making the religions that we know today

Answer 2

its just an asteriod flying on near earths atmosphere i believe of just i flyinh commet  

Answer 3

A meteor!

Answer 4

A shooting star is just a small piece of rock, metal or ice, which enters Earths atmosphere at high speeds of many kilometers per seconds (up to 72 km/s).

It gets slowed down by friction in a matter of seconds, with most of the kinetic energy getting used for turning the air into brightly glowing plasma: A trail of light - the shooting star you see.

A few fractions of a second later, the plasma cools down again and becomes invisible. Because the plasma has special electric properties, the creation and end of the plasma trail causes electromagnetic waves, which you can receive with typical amateur radio gear.  

Answer 5

a shooting star is a meteor that is skipping through the atmosphere and burning up on entry.

Answer 6

"Shooting star" is a popular term for meteor. Meteors are small pieces of space dust, usually no larger than a pea, which enter the Earth's upper atmosphere and are heated by friction to incandescence. They are not really moving very fast, but only seem to because they are very close to us (about 100-200 kilometes), as opposed to stars, which are very large and very very far away.

Answer 7

im pretty sure its a comet falling. or something like that

im not completley sure so don't trust it lol

Answer 8

it's a piece of the milky way that has come too close to our earth's gravity. The reason it shines is because of the aurora borealis.

Answer 9

Those things you see streaking across the night sky are not actually stars... they are meteorites... small pieces of a meteor, often smaller than a pebble. When they enter the atmosphere at the speeds they do (which is not at the speed of light), they burn up. During this event, the light let out my this is amplified by the Earth's atmosphere. Because they look about the size of a star, primitive man thought that they were stars shooting from the sky when, in fact, they aren't.

Answer 10

I tend to think of John Wayne or Yosemite Sam when I hear the expression "shooting star."

Answer 11

its a meteorite going through the atmosphere. it is bright because it is burning.

make it a good day

Answer 12

It's a piece of debris the size of a dust particle, that strikes the earth's atmosphere at such a high rate of speed that it burns up and makes a REALLY bright light for a few seconds in the process.