A meteor is a broken fragment of rock from space, such as debris from an asteroid collision, that enters Earth atmosphere. They are typically visible at night as they make fast moving streaks through the sky and are popularly referred to as shooting stars. The name meteor is changed to meteorite when a meteor actually hits the ground rather than burning up in the atmosphere; meteors and meteorites are the same thing, though, just in different stages of their journeys. Thousands of meteorites
