After reading this, I cannot get this They Might Be Giants song out of my head: A shooting star is not a star, is not a star at all A shooting star's a meteor that's headed for a fall A shooting star is not a star, why does it shine so bright? The friction as it falls through air produces heat and light. A shooting star or meteor, whichever name you like, The minute it comes down to earth, is called a meteorite! That's spot-on, too. Meteors are chunks of dust and rock which drift through space, and occasionally one gets near enough to Earth and at the right angle to start falling into our atmosphere. As it's pulled downwards at high speeds, a large amount of friction builds up between the meteor and the air, resulting in a fantastic amount of heat--and light, which is what you see when one flashes by. As you've no doubt noticed, the whole process takes only a few seconds (shorter, for small ones). Occasionally, enough of the meteor survives the burn that it actually falls to the Earth's surface--and that's a meteorite. (Try not to be underneath when it happens.) Sometimes a whole bunch of meteors will pass through the atmosphere in a short amount of time. They're debris left over from the tail of a passing comet, and our planet just happened to be in the right place at the right time. If you've never had the chance to watch a meteor shower, I highly recommend it! Here's a site with a little more data, including some about specific meteor showers: http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question12.html

A streak of light in the sky at night that results when a meteoroid hits the Earth's atmosphere and air friction causes the meteoroid to melt or vaporize or explode. Shooting stars are small cosmical bodies which encounter the earth in its annual revolution, and which become visible by coming with planetary velocity into the upper regions of the atmosphere. At certain periods, as on the 13th of November and 10th of August, they appear for a few hours in great numbers, apparently diverging from some point in the heavens, such displays being known as meteoric showers, or star showers. These bodies, before encountering the earth, were moving in orbits closely allied to the orbits of comets.