Meteors, meteorites, and Meteoroids

Authors note: This is my project on Meteors and there siblings. I am working on making my writing more specific and well described. I hope you enjoy it.

You could be sitting in your backyard looking up to the sky. You see the all of the stars shining brightly. Then out of the corner of your eye, you see something moving. You look more closely and notice that it is a Meteor. You are amazed at the hundreds of moving stars all around. Before you know it they all stop. You look around confused, wondering why they stopped. That is the beauty of a meteor shower.

There are three different types, or stages, of a meteor, all of which are very important. The first stage is a Meteoroid. This is a meteor that is currently in space or just eroded off of a comet or asteroid. These are very hard to see even with a telescope. There are millions of meteoroids flying around the universe waiting to be caught in a planets gravitational pull and be lead toward the next stage of it's life.

As a meteoroid falls through a planets atmosphere it becomes, it transitions in to the next stage, a meteor. During the fall to the ground, a meteor will become very hot and it will begin to burn up. When large amounts of meteors fall into the atmosphere, a meteor shower starts. During a meteor shower, meteors become very bright due to the large amount of heat. If a meteor can survive the heat and gets to the ground it become its last stage.

After a meteor hits the ground it becomes the final stage, a meteorite. When a meteorite hits the ground it is usually very small, this is because the heat it sustained still damaged the meteorite and burned layers of the meteorite off. You have more of a chance at winning the lottery than you do finding a meteorite in your yard and if you do find a meteor, it might be close to the size of a golf ball and could still way around 20 pounds!  
   

Seeing a meteor shower gives you the opportunity of seeing the most important stage of a meteor, it is the most common stage to see., the other two stages are a little harder. The life cycle of a meteor is a short one and is finished after it hits the ground. A meteor shower is an amazing opportunity to see something from space, something that many people will never be able to see, and that is the beauty of a meteor shower.    

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