Meteorites are shooting stars. They completely burn out while they hit Earth’s atmosphere. Apply the concept of impulse to explain their burning action.
Answers
Meteor showers occur when dust or particles from asteroids or comets enter Earth's atmosphere at very high speed. When they hit the atmosphere, meteors rub against air particles and create friction, heating the meteors. The heat vaporizes most meteors, creating what we call shooting stars.
While there are stray bits of stuff hitting Earth from all directions, there also are regularly timed "meteor showers" when astronomers can make better predictions about how many meteors will hit the Earth, and from what direction. The key difference is that meteor showers occur when the Earth plows into the trail of particles left behind by a comet or asteroid. Depending on where the trail of particles falls in a particular year, meteor showers can be more or less intense.
Astronomers sometimes even find new meteor showers, such as the case of the Camelopardalids in 2014. Initial predictions put the shower at up to 200 meteors per hour, but in reality, it ended up being a quiet shower for amateur astronomers. The shower became active after the debris trail of Comet 209P/LINEAR intersected with Earth. (The debris trail of comets can shift because of the influence of Jupiter, or other reasons.)
Most meteors become visible at around 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) up. Some large meteors splatter, causing a brighter flash called a fireball, which can often be seen during the day and heard up to 30 miles (48 km) away. On average, meteors can speed through the atmosphere at about 30,000 mph (48,280 kph) and reach temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,648 degrees Celsius).
Most meteors are very small, some as tiny as a grain of sand, so they disintegrate in the air. Larger ones that reach the Earth's surface are called meteorites and are rare.