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

By Adam Lark, Associate Professor of Instruction for Physics, Hamilton College

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…

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