| Unlike comets which are are
balls of ice and cosmic dust, meteors are chunks of rock, often from the
clumping of cosmic dust, or chips off of asteroids. They are quite
small too, usually being the size of a peanut. To clear things up, a meteor
is the object streaking across the sky, and a meteorite is the fragment
that is recovered from Earth. On August 25th, 1995, a huge meteor
between the size of a baseball and basketball fell to earth. Those
are usually rare, and are commonly known as shooting stars. When
meteors enter Earth's atmosphere, they hit it with the speed of fifty times
the velocity of a bullet. Because this is so fast, they also burn
up quickly too. Not as brilliant as a comet, they still have a long
tail of gases and chemicals that quickly burns up when it hits the atmosphere. |
Image: Meteor and Coin
Image Source: Arachnauts
Meteorite Gallery
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