Shooting Stars Research Paper

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Shooting Stars Rocks It’s most likely you have heard or even seen a shooting star fly across the sky. But what is this shooting star that you see? Well, it’s not a star at all but actually a rock from space called a meteor. These meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a high speed and creates a bright streak in the sky from the hot air following it. This is formed by the intense resistance from the air around the speeding rock (source #1) and not by the rock burning up, which is usually the misconception. They do burn up while scraping the Earth’s atmosphere, however. That means we get a nice scene in the night sky as well as being relatively safe from harm when they reach Earth. Where do these mysterious rocks come from? Most of these…show more content…
When they do, they are classified as meteorites. These meteorites are generally not risky and usually cause minimal damage. Since the meteors are not usually that large and easily burn up in the atmosphere, they are quite miniscule when they reach the surface of Earth – mostly the size of a grain of sand. It is believed that “several hundred meteorites larger than marbles reach Earth’s surface each year” (#3). Though, very few of these are seen or found by humans. The most well-known meteorite that was severe is the meteorite that caused the extinction of dinosaurs. This meteorite created a crater that is 110 miles across and nearly wiped out every single living thing on Earth. Extremely uncommon is an understatement when it comes to that situation though, seeing that it happened 65 million years ago. So meteorites are not seen as a common…show more content…
It was reported that nearly 240,000 meteors rained down on Earth in a 9 hour span. In a time where there wasn’t much known about meteor showers, humans feared for their lives as it looked like the sky was falling. Many remarked how it looked like the meteors were coming out of the constellation Leo, the lion constellation. This was a remarkable find for astronomers across the world because it led them to believe that these meteors had origins from vast “astronomical realms” (#4) and aren’t just being thrown around in space. And so, The Leonids were born and an understanding of these once terrifying events had been established. Since that year, astronomers were able to figure out the patterns of these meteor showers and estimate when they would appear

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