If “shooting star” is usually a grain of sand space that burns as light. What exactly causes this burning?

A “shooting star” is usually a grain of sand from outer space that burns up and gives off light as it enters the atmosphere. What exactly causes this burning?|||Friction with atmospheric air at very high velocity of 70kilometer per second.|||When the piece of "sand", actually called a meteoroid, enters the atmosphere it rub against the particles in the atmosphere. Creating friction and heat, it also gives off light. What Sheldon said was it moving towards the sun is actually a comet, that has nothing to with shooting stars. Do not refer to it as "space sand" it makes you sound very unintelligent.








The "sand" is called a meteor in space, a meteoroid in the atmosphere, and a meteorite if it makes it to the ground on Earth.|||Friction causes heat. The shooting star is travelling at very high (and variable) speed. The friction with the air causes it to heat up, As it heats up more it turns white hot and emits visible light.





Robert 7264 is wrong, A meteoroid is small body moving in the solar system on a collision course with the earth's atmosphere. It becomes a meteor when it travels through the earths atmosphere. If it hits the earth and some of it survives the impact, that part which survives is a meteorite.|||It doesn't burn, it just gets very hot by "friction"*. when it enters the atmosphere, it is very fast. When it hits the air, the air slows the particle down and the particle and the air get both hotter.





It is exactly the same kind of phenomena that makes your hand get warm when you slip down a rope, or what makes the brakes on sport cars or aircraft glow red while braking.





*See definition of ram pressure before just copying what Phil Plait says.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamic…





The highest temperatures don't occur, where most hot air is passing by, but where the compressing work is done.





Short: Phil Plaits popular explanation of ram pressure is not experimentally validated, for example on real spacecraft. Actually, the rule of thumb for aerospace engineer students is: Beyond Mach 8, air behaves like a incompressible fluid because of the viscosity of air. There is no significant change in pressure anymore.





And he is in the same explanation also wrong on the sensibility of Space Shuttle tiles: While the foam inside the tiles is really very soft, the outside of the tiles is Reaction Cured Glass, a pretty hard, but brittle material. Without this coating outside, the tiles really react to the air flow as Phil Plait paints in his explanation.





But is it really necessary to have a long scientific argument to explain that the irreversible thermodynamic process that removes kinetic energy from the meteor is the interaction with the air?|||Robert said, "The "sand" is called a meteor in space, a meteoroid in the atmosphere, and..."





Actually it's the other way around. "Meteor" is the oldest name. A meteor is a streak of light in the sky. People called it that before they ever knew the cause. "Meterorite" came next. It was what they called the unusual rocks that they found in the crater where a meteor touched the ground. The "ite" suffix appears in the names of many things (especially minerals) that are found in the ground. Finally, when scientists were able to overcome their skepticism and accept the fact that rocks actually DO fall from the sky, they coined the name "meteoroid" to describe a rock in space that potentially could become a meteor/meteorite.





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Several people said, "...friction..."





It's actually not friction that heats a meteoroid to incandescence. It's the compression of the air in front of the object as the object hits the atmosphere at hypersonic velocity. Next time you pump up a tire with a bicycle pump, feel the cylinder after you're done. It can be warm, or even hot. That's because air gets hot (as predicted by the Ideal Gas Law) when you compress it.|||Most people would say due to friction, the glow is actually due to the atmospheric ram pressure 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.|||Meteors compress the air beneath them as they fall, so the air heats up until it is hot enough to burn the meteor. A similar phenomenon occurs when you inflate a bicycle tire with a hand pump. The pump gets heated by the air it compresses.|||The shooting star is called a meteorite.


The cause of its burning is that the gravitational pull of the earth causes the "shooting star" to burn|||Friction with the air causes it to burn up on entry.