Asteroid or comet? Meteor or meteorite? How to identify and classify the rocks you see streaking through the sky

Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky? As the director of the Peters Observatory at Hamilton College, I have seen many similar streaks across the sky, as I spend late nights at the observatory, and I am here to tell you that what you saw isn’t a star at all. You observed the end of a comet or asteroid’s 4.6-billion-year journey right before your eyes. Remnants from the early solar system Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was in its infancy. A vast ball of gas and dust that would become our solar system was accumulating matter in its center, forming what would eventually become our Sun. It was also condensing dust in smaller patches farther from the center that would merge into the first chunks of materials, called planetesimals. Asteroids formed from planetesimals in the inner portions of the solar system, near the Sun. This location in the center of the solar system was warm, so the planetesimals were made mostly of the rocks and metals that could…

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