Hi, yesterday on 8th march 2009 at 6 a.m. i had gone to play cricket and it was twilight. Luckily i was looking up in the sky and i saw a shooting star! It was unbelievable. It was starlight trail and a star appeared for a second with a small flash. I thought it wasn't real, it was like cartoon magic! - kunal pagare khan
Despite over four billion years having passed since the solar system settled down, there is still a fair amount of dust about as well as rocks. A grain of dust the size of a speck of sand can produce a shooting star as it enters the Earth's atmosphere at incredible speeds (the Earth is going around the sun at 66,000 mph so even if a particle is going across the Earth's path, it still has incredible speed) and in moments turns white hot and vapourises. Sometimes small rocks make it to Earth. They will often look pitted and as though the surface has been melted. Most times if you spend an hour outside at night looking up, you'll see a shooting star but there are times of the year when there can be a lot of them, when Earth periodically goes through dust clouds in it's trip around the sun. Here is a table with the constellation you should look at to see them coming in: http://www.northern-stars.com/meteor_showers.htm Check out the Bootes constellation tonight and the next few nights if you can see it from your area.
