Meteor

Meteor! is a 1987 children's picture book by author Patricia Polacco. Polacco is well known for writing and illustrating stories depicting events from her childhood in Michigan. Meteor! was published in 1987 by The Trumpet Club, commonly known for publications of children's books from grades PreK-6. The story is about Patricia, her brother Richard, and Cousin Steve as young children spending time with their grandparents on their farm in Michigan. It seems to be a normal summer night until a flash from the sky and a crash in the yard. According to Publishers Weekly, "Based on a true event, this enchanting book overwhelmingly expresses the magic that suddenly pervades a small town, from the funny folksy way the story is told to the imaginative, full color illustrations." Booklist says, "Polacco’s full-color pictures are completely in tandem with the telling".

(ALMA) A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star , is a glowing streak of a small body (usually meteoroid) going through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a streak of light via its rapid motion and sometimes also by shedding glowing material in its wake. Meteors typically occur in the mesosphere at altitudes from . The root word meteor comes from the Greek μετεωρίτης (meteōrítēs), meaning "high in the air". Millions of meteors occur in Earth's atmosphere daily. Most meteoroids that cause meteors are about the size of a grain of sand, i.e. they are usually or smaller. Meteoroid sizes can be calculated from their mass and density which, in turn, can be estimated from the observed meteor trajectory in the upper atmosphere. Meteors may occur in showers, which arise when Earth passes through a stream of debris left by a comet, or as "random" or "sporadic" meteors, not associated with a specific stream of space debris. A number of specific meteors have been observed, largely by members of the public and largely by accident, but with enough detail that orbits of the meteoroids producing the meteors have been calculated. The atmospheric velocities of meteors result from the movement of Earth around the Sun at about , the orbital speeds of meteoroids, and the gravity well of Earth. Meteors become visible between about above Earth. They usually disintegrate at altitudes of . Meteors have roughly a fifty percent chance of a daylight (or near daylight) collision with Earth. Most meteors are, however, observed at night, when darkness allows fainter objects to be recognized. For bodies with a size scale larger than to several meters meteor visibility is due to the atmospheric ram pressure (not friction) that heats the meteoroid so that it glows and creates a shining trail of gases and melted meteoroid particles. The gases include vaporised meteoroid material and atmospheric gases that heat up when the meteoroid passes through the atmosphere. Most meteors glow for about a second. ==References==

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