There are 2 words people tend to confuse with each other: meteors and meteoroids. Meteors are essentially streaks of light made by burning debris from comets. To put it more romantically, meteors are “shooting stars”! Meteoroids are space rocks before they enter the earth’s atmosphere and lose the –oid part of their name.

These things are fragments of comets. Just like Earth and other planets, comets move around the Sun. And when they come near it, the Sun boils away some of their icy surfaces, and dust and rock break away. And – meteoroids are born. There’s plenty of this stuff floating out in space and circling the Sun. But occasionally, our planet comes across a trail of debris when our orbits cross paths...

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