Commonly called by the old fashioned and misleading names of shooting stars or falling stars, a meteor is actually the streak of light produced in the sky when a meteoroid enters our atmosphere. A meteorite is a meteoroid that has survived its trip through our atmosphere and has struck the earth. A few meteors per hour can be seen throughout the night, but meteor showers occur when Earth goes through more concentrated streams of meteoroid material in space, increasing the number of meteors per hour that can be detected.
Different showers have rates ranging from a few to about a hundred meteors per hour.
Individual meteor showers usually happen at about the same time every year. There are minor showers every month, and about a half dozen major showers each year. Nearly all meteor showers come from streams of debris left behind by comets, although a few are associated with asteroids. Meteor storms occur on the rare occasions when Earth passes through particularly dense meteoroid streams. Since the meteoroids entering Earth s atmosphere during a meteor shower are traveling through space in nearly parallel paths, the shower meteors seem to come from a definite point in the sky called a radiant.