Sporadic meteor
A meteor that does not belong to any known shower, arriving at random from any direction.
Not every shooting star is part of a shower. Even on an ordinary night, meteors appear from all sorts of directions. These are sporadic meteors, made by dust and small particles that have spread out from old streams and orbit the Sun more or less randomly. Over long periods, the gravity of the planets and other forces scatter stream particles until they lose their family resemblance.
Sporadic meteors are actually a large part of all the meteors that hit Earth. From a dark site you might see several an hour on any clear night, more in the hours before dawn. That is because, by then, you are on the side of Earth facing the direction it is travelling around the Sun, so you run into more particles, like a car windscreen catching more raindrops on the front than on the back window.
To decide whether a meteor is sporadic, trace its path backwards. If it does not line up with the radiant of an active shower, and its speed does not match, it is probably sporadic. Most meteorite-dropping fireballs are not shower members either; Winchcombe, which fell in England in 2021, came from the asteroid belt.
Related terms
Level: Explorer Ages 10 and up