You can also view previously answered questions in the HSW Question Archive . If you've spent much time looking up at the night sky, you've probably seen some spectacular meteors and meteor showers. Discussing meteor activity can be tricky because the terminology is confusing. The term meteor actually refers to the streak of light caused by a piece of space debris burning up in the atmosphere.
Meteoroids have a pretty big size range.
This dust tends to be made up of fairly small particles. It turns out that what these meteoroids lack in mass they make up for in speed, and this is what causes the flash of light in the sky. They can travel at this rate very easily in the vacuum of space because there's nothing to stop them. The earth's atmosphere, on the other hand, is full of matter, which creates a great deal of friction on a traveling object. They don't get vaporized because they are light enough that they slow down very easily.