Are shooting stars really stars?
No. A shooting star is a tiny bit of space dust burning up high in our air. Real stars are giant balls of hot gas, very far away.
On a dark night you might see a quick streak of light zip across the sky. People call it a shooting star, but it has nothing to do with real stars at all.
A real star is a gigantic ball of glowing gas, like our Sun. Even the closest star after the Sun is so far away that its light takes more than four years to reach us. Stars do not fall out of the sky. If one came anywhere near Earth, it would swallow our whole planet!
A shooting star is much smaller and much closer. Its proper name is a meteor. It happens when a speck of space dust or a little pebble, usually smaller than a grain of rice, rushes into Earth's air at enormous speed. It hits the air so hard that the air around it gets incredibly hot and glows. That glow is what you see. It happens about 100 kilometres above the ground, higher than aeroplanes and even higher than the tallest clouds.
So next time you spot a shooting star, you can tell your friends that you have just watched a piece of space dust, perhaps older than the Earth, finish its long journey in a flash of light.