Doggerel or not, the student’s definition correctly stated the true distinction between the two terms, and the teacher marked his off-beat answer correct.
Defined in more scientific terms, a meteor is the streak of light (usually of brief duration) that accompanies the flight of a particle of matter from outer space through our atmosphere. This particle may be as small as a tiny dust grain or as large as one of the minor planets which are called asteroids. Fortunately for the inhabitants of the earth, most of the meteor-forming masses encountered by our globe are of the “small-fry” variety!
As the rapidly moving particle plunges earthward through denser and denser layers of atmosphere, the air molecules offer ever-increasing resistance to its passage. This resistance heats up the meteorite body until it glows. Technically speaking, it becomes incandescent. The meteor is this incandescence. We see it as a darting point. Or as a ball of white, orange, bluish, or reddish light. But the material object that produced this light is the meteorite. The distinction between these two terms—meteor and meteorite—we must emphasize again and again because people continue to use them incorrectly, as, for instance, when they keep saying “meteor crater” instead of “meteorite crater.”
The majority of the meteors we observe represent the heat-induced “evaporation” of exceedingly small fragments of cosmic matter. The smallest meteor-forming bodies reach the surface of the earth only as the finest of dust particles or as microscopic droplets of solidified meteorite melt.
These residues descend slowly through the atmosphere and may be carried for great distances. Afterwards, they may be found scattered so widely and uniformly on the ground that their presence in any given locality cannot be accounted for by the fall of any specific meteorite. This is a fact that, for example, one school of modern Russian meteoriticists overlooked when they were dealing with tiny granules of meteoritic dust that had been recently found at Podkamennaya Tunguska. These scientists tried to identify the tiny granules with the meteorite that had fallen there, June 30, 1908. But the members of the latest (1958) Russian expedition to that region about the impact point of 1908 clearly recognize the widespread character of meteoritic dust. So they reject the theory that such dust found in the Podkamennaya Tunguska area is specifically connected with the meteorite that fell there a half century ago.
If sizable chunks of meteoritic material enter the atmosphere, they may produce exceptionally large and brilliant meteors. A spectacular meteor is generally known as a “fireball” if it is as bright as Venus or Jupiter. It receives the French term bolide if, in addition to showing great brilliance, its flight is accompanied by detonations like the alarming sounds heard at the time of the Ussuri and Norton meteorite falls.
COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS A bright Giacobinid meteor, photographed from a B-29 during the shower of October 9, 1946. See [p. 115].
The term “shooting star,” which is often applied to meteors, in newspapers and magazine articles, is a misnomer. A meteor is not a distant sun (that is, a star) in rapid motion, for the whole path of the meteor lies close at hand within a restricted zone of the earth’s atmosphere.
The word “meteor” comes from the Greek word meteōra, which once applied to any natural occurrence in the atmosphere—for example, rainbows, halos, auroras, and so forth. Nowadays, the word “meteor” is used in a much more specialized sense than it was by the ancient Greeks. We have a specialized word, meteoritics, for the study of meteors and meteorites. No one should confuse meteoritics with meteorology, which is the science of things other than meteors and meteorites, in the atmosphere—for example, clouds, storms, air currents.