Kids ask

Almost never. They happen about 100 kilometres up, much too far away to hear. Very rarely, a huge fireball makes a rumble or a boom that arrives a few minutes later, like distant thunder.

Most look white or yellow. Some glow green, orange or red. The colours come from metals in the speck of dust and from the air around it as they glow.

Usually tiny. Most shooting stars come from specks smaller than a grain of sand. A really bright one might come from something the size of a pea or a pebble.

Most glow between about 80 and 120 kilometres above the ground. That is about ten times higher than aeroplanes fly.

Between about 11 and 72 kilometres every second. The fastest could cross the whole of Britain in about 15 seconds.

A fireball is a very bright shooting star, brighter than the planet Venus. It is made by a bigger piece of space rock. Sometimes pieces of it reach the ground as meteorites.

Sadly not. The speck that makes a shooting star burns away about 100 kilometres up. All that is left is a little smoke-like dust that drifts down slowly over weeks or months.

During a meteor shower, on a clear night with no bright Moon. The Perseids in August and the Geminids in December are two of the best. Most showers are best after midnight.

No. Your eyes are best, because shooting stars can appear anywhere in the sky. A telescope only shows a tiny patch at a time.

Yes. Anyone anywhere on Earth can see them on a clear, dark night. Some meteor showers are better from the north of the world, and some from the south.

A meteorite is a rock or piece of metal from space that has landed on Earth. Most are pieces of asteroids. A few come from the Moon or Mars.

Usually not. The outside melts during the fall, but only for a few seconds. The inside stays cold from space, so most meteorites are only warm or even cold when they land.

Many meteorites contain grains of iron and nickel metal, which is heavy. So a meteorite often feels heavier than an Earth rock of the same size.

Because most meteorites contain iron metal, and magnets are attracted to iron. A few rare kinds, like many from the Moon and Mars, hardly react at all.

Tens of thousands. Scientists have given official names to more than 70,000 meteorites from all over the world. Most were found in Antarctica and in hot deserts.

Hoba, in Namibia. It is a slab of iron and nickel that weighs about 60 tonnes, as heavy as about ten elephants. It is too heavy to move, so it still lies where it was found.

The smallest are micrometeorites, tiny grains of space dust smaller than a grain of sand. You need a microscope to see them properly.

Most are about 4.6 billion years old, as old as the Solar System. That makes them older than almost every rock on Earth.

Dark rocks are easy to spot on white snow and blue ice. Moving ice also carries meteorites along and gathers them together in some places, where scientists go to collect them.

In the United Kingdom, a meteorite usually belongs to whoever owns the land where it landed. Rules are different in other countries, so always ask first.

Tell a grown-up. Take a photo, and do not scratch, wash or break it. A museum or a meteorite scientist can tell you if it is real. Most rocks people find turn out to be Earth rocks, and that is still interesting.

Each meteorite is named after the place where it fell or was found, such as Winchcombe in England. That way, scientists all over the world know which one they are talking about.

No crater has been found on land in Britain. But in north-west Scotland there is a layer of rock made from material thrown out by a huge impact about 1.2 billion years ago.

A big space rock hits so fast that it acts like an explosion. The explosion pushes out evenly in every direction, so the hole is round, even when the rock comes in at a slant.

Meteor Crater in Arizona, in the United States, is one of the best known. It is more than a kilometre wide, and visitors can look down into it from the rim.

About 170 metres deep. That is about as deep as a 50-storey building is tall.

Yes. Small space rocks still hit the Moon. Spacecraft circling the Moon have photographed new little craters, and telescopes on Earth have seen tiny flashes where rocks hit.

Yes. Mercury and Mars have lots, and so do many moons and asteroids. Craters are the most common landform on rocky worlds in the Solar System.

They look for clues that only a huge impact leaves behind. These include special shocked minerals, cone-shaped cracks in rock called shatter cones, and sometimes pieces of the space rock itself.

Yes. Rain can fill a crater bowl. Lonar Lake in India and Pingualuit in Canada are both lakes inside impact craters.

An asteroid is a rocky or metal object that travels around the Sun. Asteroids are much smaller than planets. Most are in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

Ceres, which is about 940 kilometres across. It is so big that it is round, and it is now called a dwarf planet.

Some do! The asteroid Ida has a tiny moon called Dactyl. The asteroid Didymos has a moon called Dimorphos.

Yes, but not often, because space is very big. When they do collide, pieces break off. Some of those pieces later fall to Earth as meteorites.

Gas and dust that the Sun's warmth releases from the comet's ice. Sunlight and a wind of particles from the Sun push them out into tails that point away from the Sun.

In 2061. Halley's Comet comes back about every 76 years. It was last seen from Earth in 1986.

Yes. In November 2014, a small lander called Philae landed on a comet called 67P. It was carried there by the Rosetta spacecraft.

Yes, spacecraft have. Hayabusa brought back grains of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010. Hayabusa2 brought back pieces of Ryugu in 2020, and OSIRIS-REx brought back pieces of Bennu in 2023.

Yes. In 2022 a spacecraft called DART crashed into a small asteroid moon called Dimorphos on purpose. It changed the moon's path a little. This tested a way to protect Earth in the future, if it is ever needed.

The Moon does not really change shape. The Sun always lights up half of it. As the Moon travels around Earth, we see different amounts of the lit half, from a thin crescent to a full Moon. The whole cycle takes about 29 and a half days.

The Moon is bright enough to see in a blue sky. It is above the horizon during the day for part of most months, so if you look at the right time, you can spot it.

About 384,000 kilometres. If you could drive a car there at motorway speed, it would take about five months without stopping.

Almost none. That means no wind and no rain. Footprints left by astronauts are still there, because nothing blows them away.

Twelve astronauts, between 1969 and 1972. They brought back about 382 kilograms of Moon rock and dust for scientists to study.

Venus. After the Sun and the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the sky. It is often seen low in the west after sunset, or low in the east before sunrise.

Planets usually shine with a steady light, while stars often twinkle. Planets also move slowly against the stars from week to week, and are always found close to the path the Sun and Moon follow.

Saturn. Scientists have found well over 200 moons around it. Most are tiny, only a few kilometres across.

Billions of pieces of ice, from tiny grains to chunks as big as a house. They all travel around Saturn together, making a thin, flat disc.

Venus, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Venus has a very thick blanket of air that traps heat. Its surface is about 465 °C, hot enough to melt lead.

Yes. The Sun is a star, and it is the closest star to Earth. The other stars look tiny only because they are so much further away.

About 8 minutes. Light is the fastest thing there is, but the Sun is about 150 million kilometres away.

Yes. Five planets are easy to see with just your eyes: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The sky calendar tells you when to look.

A meteoriticist. Many are also called planetary scientists, because meteorites help them understand planets, moons and asteroids.

With special saws that have diamond on the blade, used very carefully by trained adults. Cutting lets them see inside and make thin slices to study under a microscope.

Magnifying glasses, magnets and scales to start with. In the laboratory they use powerful microscopes that can see things far too small for our eyes, and machines that can tell which elements a rock contains.

Some atoms inside rocks slowly change into other kinds of atom at a steady rate, like a very slow clock. By measuring how much has changed, scientists work out how old the rock is.

Some Mars meteorites have tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside. That gas is a match for the air of Mars, which was measured by spacecraft that landed there.

Yes! Counting shooting stars during a meteor shower, and reporting a bright fireball with an adult, both give scientists useful information. Lots of discoveries have been made by people who simply looked carefully.

How the Sun and planets formed, what the inside of a planet is made of, and where Earth's water may have come from. Meteorites are like time capsules from the start of the Solar System.

Keep asking questions and keep looking up! Science and maths at school are a great start. Many meteorite scientists studied geology, chemistry or physics at university.