A shooting star is not really a star at all. It's a tiny piece of dust or rock that enters the Earth's atmosphere at high speed and burns up, creating a bright streak of light in the sky.
These are also called meteors, and they can happen any time of the year.
Sometimes you can see a lot of them in one night, especially during a meteor shower, which is when the Earth passes through the trail of debris left by a comet.
Some of the most famous meteor showers are the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December.
Now, a falling star is also not a star, but it's a bit different from a shooting star.
A falling star is a meteor that survives its journey through the atmosphere and lands on the ground.
These are also called meteorites, and they are very rare. Most meteors are too small to make it to the surface, and they vaporize completely in the air.
This gargantuan meteorite is currently the largest known “falling star”. Called the Hoba. It is nearly 60 tons and has never been moved. It has been estimated to have landed on Earth 80,000 years ago.
But some of them are big enough or dense enough to reach the Earth, and they can cause craters or damage when they hit.
Some of the most famous meteorites are the Hoba meteorite in Namibia, which weighs about 60 tons, and the Chelyabinsk meteorite in Russia, which exploded in the air in 2013 and injured over 1,000 people.
Chelyabinsk meteorite
Most of the elements that make up the periodic table are produced in supernovae explosions - the final stage of evolution of massive stars. So it is true nearly all the elements in the human body are made in a star and many have come through several supernovae - recycled.
Stars carry out nuclear fusion reactions at their cores, producing light elements until it reaches the stage of iron. This is when the fusion reactions cease because fusion of iron consumes more energy than it can produce. When fusion stops, the star is not in hydrostatic balance anymore,, and it explodes as a supernova, expelling all the elements that had been generated so far. Then the next generation of stars form from those elements, burn and are again swept out. This is how star material is recycled.
When the supernova explosion occurs the blast initially contains a large density of free neutrons, which may rapidly synthesize, generating roughly half of the elements in the universe that are heavier than iron.
The coldest known place in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula, which has a temperature of -458 degrees Fahrenheit (-272 degrees Celsius).
There is a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B, a molecular cloud located near the center of the Milky Way. It contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.
The International Space Station orbits the Earth at a speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour), which means it travels around the Earth in about 90 minutes.
The highest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars. It's about 3 times taller than Mount Everest and the largest volcano in the solar system.
The largest known structure in the universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a cluster of galaxies located about 10 billion light-years away from Earth. It's about 10 billion light-years long and contains more than 10,000 galaxies.
There is a black hole in the galaxy IC 1101 that is so large it has a mass of about 40 billion times that of our sun.
The Apollo astronauts left behind more than just footprints on the moon. They also left a variety of objects, including flags, lunar rovers, and even bags of human waste.
The atmosphere of Venus is so hot that lead would melt on its surface.
There is a planet in the constellation Draco called Kepler-16b that orbits two stars. It's also known as Tatooine, after the fictional planet from Star Wars.
The center of the Milky Way smells like rum and tastes like raspberries, according to astronomers who detected a compound called ethyl formate in the galactic center.
