The shooting Stars fascinate young and old alike. Do you remember when a shooting star crosses the sky, we are used to hearing: “Make a wish, make a wish!” “. But, scientifically speaking, what do we know about a shooting star ? We will explain everything to you!
A shooting star is actually the phenomenon that follows the entry into the Earth’s upper atmosphere of a body called ” meteoroid “. The latter is a small body of the Solar System which comes from the disintegration of an asteroid or a cometary nucleus in the atmosphere. Also to know that the upper earth atmosphere is located between 65 and 135 kilometers altitude.
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What causes a shooting star and how big is it?
The International Astronomical Union estimates that there are different sizes of shooting stars, between 30 micrometers and 1 meter. However, these estimates would be relatively arbitrary. Below this range, we would speak of “interplanetary dust” and above, we speak of an asteroid.
Therefore, the shooting stars we see are caused by small grains of dust that come from space. These disintegrate as they enter our atmosphere. These dusts have speeds of around 40 km / s. Generally, the impact speed of a shooting star varies between 30 and 70 km / s or between 100,000 and 250,000 km / h, depending on whether the collision is frontal or not.
What are the Perseids?
In addition, you should also know that there are meteors called Perseids. This is’a swarm of meteors visible in Earth’s atmosphere from debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. The size of these meteors is very variable. They may as well have the size of a grain of sand than that of a pea. These meteors travel at a speed of between 58 km / s, or about 210,000 km / h.
You should know that our Solar System is filled with this dust and the Earth, which moves at a speed of 29 km / s around the Sun, constantly sweeps it.