Around 100 tons of it

falls to earth every day.

You might have been lucky enough to have seen

a shooting star,

but do you know what a shooting star is?

Is it a comet?, meteorite? Maybe an asteroid?

Comet

A comet (also called a dirty snowball)

is essentially ball of ice,

rock and dust that orbits the sun

ranging in size from around 1km to 20km.

Astronomers believe they are leftovers from the early formation

of the solar system that reside in one of two places

on the very outskirts of the solar system;

The Kuiper belt and the Oort Cloud.

These two areas are made up of small icy bodies

of frozen gases such as methane, ammonia,

nitrogen and water mixed with rock and dust.

Occasionally a comets orbit will be altered by a

gravitational tug of another large object

or through a collision with another body that might

send it into the inner solar system

or sometimes even straight towards the sun.

As a comet starts to move closer the sun

it heats up and ice starts to evaporate and form a cloud around the nucleus, called the coma.

Two tails form as well, the ion tail and the dust tail.

The dust tail

is made from the dust forming around the nucleus

it is being pushed by solar radiation from the sun

following the orbit of the comet

The ion tail is generally blue

made of ionized gas

and points directly away from the solar winds coming from the sun.

Asteroid

Nearly all Asteroids are odd shaped chunks of rock that orbit the sun

n the asteroid belt between mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid belt is thought to be either left over mass

from a failed planet forming

due to the close gravitational pull of Jupiter

or the leftovers from a planet that broke up due to a collision.

Sizes vary from 10 meters to 1000 kilometers wide

Ceres is the largest we have ever found

and is 960km wide

which is about as wide as Texas

and big enough to be classed as a dwarf planet.

Some asteroids also have their own moons!

Meteoroid

Space debris smaller than 10 meter asteroids are called meteoroids.

They can be as small as a grain of sand

They are usually bits of asteroids that have collided or leftover debris from a comet.

When a meteoroid enters earths atmosphere it will hurtle towards Earth

as it starts to burn up completely

and creates a dazzling trail of light due to the air resistance it encounters.

This is called a meteor

or as we sometimes call them, shooting stars.

When a rock is large enough to survie entry

It will end up hitting the Earths surface, usually the size of a pebble.

It is then known as a meteorite.

The largest ever found is a 3 meter wide

66 ton tablet shape meteorite

Found in Namibia, that fell 80,000 years ago.

Every year around mid July to mid August

the Earth's orbit takes us through the dust and debris

left behind by a comet.

This is called the Perseid meteor shower

and creates an incredible display of shooting stars

with around 80 shooting stars an hour.

You can find out more about this and how to view the spectacle in the link at the end of the video or in the description below.