A "falling star" or a "shooting star" has nothing at all to do with a star! These amazing streaks of light you can sometimes see in the night sky are caused by tiny bits of dust and rock called meteoroids falling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. The short-lived trail of light the burning meteoroid produces is called a meteor. Meteors ...

Most meteors glow for only a few seconds prior to burning up before hitting the Earth's surface. On most dark nights, meteors can be seen. The chance of seeing a meteor with the unaided eye increases after midnight. People often refer to meteors as "falling" or "shooting" stars. The brightest of the meteors are called fireballs.

This photograph shows one of the meteorites which survived the "Chicago Fireball".

Star watching has occupied humans from the earliest times. Our ancestors studied the night sky and saw shapes and patterns among the stars. They often made up stories to explain what they saw. The same star constellation was seen very differently by people from different countries, or even different parts of the same country.

A meteoroid is a piece of stone-like or metal-like debris which travels in outer space. Most meteoroids are no bigger than a pebble.

A theory that is attracting considerable attention states that gamma-ray bursts occur as the result of material shooting towards Earth at almost the speed of light as the result of a hypernova. A hypernova explosion can occur when the largest of the supermassive stars come to the end of their lives and collapse to form black holes. Hypernova ...

It is estimated that hundreds of millions of pieces of space trash are now floating through our region of the solar system.

An asteroid is a rocky body in space which may be only a few hundred feet wide or it may be several hundred miles wide.

Giotto also made a close encounter with Comet Grigg-Skjellerup on July 10, 1992. Aimed directly at the comet, Giotto missed the comet by only 200 km. Flying by at 14 km/second (as opposed to 68 km/sec for Halley), and with a measured dust production rate about 1/200 of Halley's, the Comet Grigg-Skjellerup encounter did very little damage to the spacecraft.

The black holes may provide quasars with their energy. Quasars are so bright that they drown out the light from all other stars in the same galaxy. The word quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source. Quasars give off radio waves, X-rays, gamma-rays, ultraviolet rays, and visible light. Most of them are larger than our solar system.