What is the difference between a comet and a shooting star?
A comet is a big icy ball travelling around the Sun, often with a glowing tail. A shooting star is a tiny bit of dust burning up in our air in a flash.
Comets and shooting stars are both beautiful, but they are very different.
A comet is a large lump of ice, rock and dust, often several kilometres across, that travels around the Sun on a long, stretched path. When it comes close to the Sun, the ice warms up and turns into gas, which streams out along with dust to make a huge glowing cloud and long tails. Comets are far out in space, millions of kilometres away. When you see one, it stays in roughly the same place in the sky for days or weeks, moving only slowly against the stars. It does not zoom across the sky.
A shooting star, or meteor, is a tiny speck of dust, often from a comet, that rushes into Earth's air and burns up about 100 kilometres above you. It lasts less than a second and moves quickly across the sky.
The two are connected! As a comet travels, it leaves a trail of dust behind. When Earth passes through that trail, lots of the dust bits hit our air, and we see a meteor shower. So many shooting stars are actually crumbs from comets.