Falling stars and souls
A meteor as a life beginning or ending: one of the oldest ideas about the night sky.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Many cultures in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia
- Region
- Worldwide
- When
- Ancient to modern
The story
In many parts of the world people have linked meteors with human lives. In some European folk traditions every person had their own star, and when it fell someone had died. In others, a falling star was a soul on its way to heaven, or a new soul coming down to be born, and people would say a short prayer when they saw one.
Similar beliefs are found far from Europe. Among a number of Aboriginal Australian communities a meteor could signal a death or the passing of a spirit, and some peoples of South America saw a meteor as a shaman's spirit travelling. These ideas are not one shared story but many separate ones, which suggests that people everywhere looked at a sudden light in the sky and thought of life and death.
What science says
Meteors are not stars. Real stars are suns, so far away that their light takes years to reach us, and none of them falls. The streak is made by a small particle from space burning up in the upper atmosphere, often a crumb of dust shed by a comet. A meteor is always much closer than it looks: usually about 100 km up, further than London is from Brighton, but tiny compared with the distance to any star.
Did you know?
Earth sweeps up several tonnes of space dust every day, mostly as particles too small to see as meteors.
Because meteors happen high up, people hundreds of kilometres apart can see the same one.