The heat created by a meteor (or meteoroid, if you prefer) vaporizes most of them high in the air. Even larger space rocks, up to basketball size, typically burn up and don’t survive to the ground, though a handful – those made of dense material – do.

However, comet material – the stuff of the Leonids – is "fluffy," astronomers say. It fragments and disintegrates easily. And anyway, amongst the Leonids there are no basketballs. We’re talking sand grains mixed in with a few marbles. All fluffy.

Nail in this cosmic coffin: Leonids are much faster than your average shooting star (or meteor, if you prefer) because they slam into Earth’s atmosphere head-on in relation to the planet’s movement. Speed: 160,000 mph (72 kilometers per second). This means that while other types of space debris on any given night might not start lighting up until about 60 miles up (100 kilometers), Leonids have been spotted turning on the juice above 87 miles (140 kilometers), where the air is really thin.

A Leonid doesn’t stand a chance of reaching the surface, no matter what you call it.