Jennifer Cushing, age 7, of St. Catharines, Ont., Canada., for her question:

HOW DOES A STAR FALL?

What we call falling stars, or shooting stars, are not stars at all but simply meteors  chunks of stone or metal. They may have come from some comet or perhaps they were left over from the formation of the solar system. They may even have come from the unknown space betwen the stars in our Milky Way.

Scientists figure more than a million meteors fall into our atmosphere every day, but we see only a few of them. Friction causes them to burn up and be reduced to ash or gas as they plunge into our atmosphere  the largest ones producing a fireworks display and the smaller ones invisible. Less than one in a hundred hits the earth. When one does reach our land we call it a meteorite.