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10 Little-Known Facts about the Leonids
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
14 November 2002
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A Leonid meteor is not a piece of space debris
Hey, wait a minute! I read …
Yes, I know. We all conveniently think of meteors as bits of space debris. It’s a white lie, and one I plan to continue committing. For the record, however, a bit of space debris is properly termed a meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere, the light phenomenon that results is called a meteor, according to the American Meteor Society. Put another way, a shooting star is a phenomenon, not a chunk of something.
Oh, and yes, we should point out that a shooting star is not a star, of course.
I refuse to give up that term, too.
And just to finish this fruitless but mildly interesting discussion of shooting star jargon (quickly, please, so we can move on to the next fact): A meteorite is "a natural object of extraterrestrial origin (meteoroid) that survives passage through the atmosphere and hits the ground."
Kids love this one: What do you call it if it misses the ground? A meteorwrong,
of course.
[Leonids Full Coverage]
And next, why most of them are in fact meteorwrongs …
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