Shooting Star
The beauty of a shooting star crossing the night sky is undeniable, but while for some people this is very romantic, for others it just suggests a bad omen. The perception of the shooting star in various cultures is both varied and suggestive; thus, westerners often make a wish when they see a falling star, while in other parts of the globe, shooting stars tell people that someone is dying. Yet, although we give all sorts of explanations to such sky events, they have a very reasonable and easy to understand scientific background. Beautiful and great as a shooting star may be, it is just false star.
A shooting star is a meteoroid, or some other boulder-sized debris form that falls on Earth and gets on fire at the entrance in the atmosphere. The great friction of the air masses and the presence of the oxygen associated with the high velocity of the meteoroid cause the star-like appearance. Thus, the shooting star often doesn't even get to touch the ground as it burns completely in the atmosphere. Larger meteoroids that don't burn completely because of their size, fall on the ground causing crater formations, but this time they are called meteors.
The light specter as well as the trajectory of the shooting star allow scientists to speculate on the structure or chemical composition of the falling body. Though observable with the naked eye only at night, meteoroids and meteors also fall during the day, but this time they are detected only by radio signals, with the sunlight making them very difficult to spot otherwise. Thus, scientists have determined that a shooting star can be light and fragile like a snowball or heavy and dense because of the hard metal core. A special kind of shooting star here is the one that passes through an atmosphere sector and gets out into space again to continue its speedy course.
A very bright shooting star is called a fireball and the measurements are made by comparing the light intensity of the meteor with that of a planet. As beautiful as it may look, a shooting star can often cause great damage on Earth's surface if it is not totally combusted during the passage through the atmosphere. Past collisions were devastating for ecosystems, with great flora and fauna damage; should such a shooting star fall in a city, the impact would be that of a bomb dropping with the intensity of the explosion varying according to the size of the meteorite.