Astronomy: A swarm of shooting stars, known formally as meteors, over the sea. Shooting stars are the visible passage of glowing meteoroids, micrometeoroids, comets or asteroids through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, they create a streak of light via rapid motion and sometimes via shedding glowing material in their wake. The visible streak of light is what gives a meteor the colloquially known name "a shooting star". If large enough, a meteor can fall to sea or land and is then a meteorite.

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Photo credit: © De Luan / Alamy / Afripics
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