Welcome along to another amazing adventure.

We get short, sharp science every Wednesday.

It's the Fun Kids Science Midweekly.

My name's Dan.

This week, Ben asks why shooting stars happen.

Keo wonders what mortar is made of.

Evie is intrigued about how birds fly.

Lily needs the answer about why you get car sick.

And Charlie wants to know what happens when we flinch.

This one's up first.

From Ben, what do you have?

Why does shooting stars happen?

Shooting stars.

Meteors.

A shooting star is not actually a star at all, but they're bright, they're up in the

sky, so we call them that. They are meteors too. They're small fragments of space debris or

rocks that enter our Earth's atmosphere. And normally they're tiny. Quite often, they can be not bigger than a grain of

sand. But because they enter the atmosphere at a phenomenally high speed up to 160,000 miles an hour,

when they do that, they bump into all the air molecules around, which causes intense friction, which heat things up.

The air pop molecules bump into other things. The speed with the friction, it creates heat,

which makes it glow brightly. The trail of the shooting star is just a lot of energy, a lot of really

bright heat energy, because something is moving very

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