Question: How are meteors formed?

Alice Harpole answered on 14 Mar 2016:

A meteor is what we call a meteoroid, micrometeoroid, comet or asteroid when it is falling through the Earth’s atmosphere. As they fall through the atmosphere, they get heated by repeated collisions with particles in the atmosphere, such that smaller objects will burn up entirely before they reach the ground. If any part of it makes its way to the Earth’s surface, we call this a meteorite.

Meteoroids are small (from the size of a grain of sand to about a metre wide) rocky or metallic objects that travel through space. There are several possible ways they can form: they might be left over from when the solar system formed (i.e. small lumps of material that didn’t manage to end up as part of a bigger planet or moon), they might be produced when larger objects (like comets or asteroids) collide and break up into smaller pieces, or they might even come from outside of the solar system entirely.