Meteorites?

What's the difference?

Well, let's start in space and work our way all the way down to the surface.

A comet is a snowball.

It's a piece of ice now.

The ice is mainly frozen gas, not water.

But there could be dust and rocks and things inside the comet Haley's comet.

Now NASA knows of about 3600 other comets.

Thin that one out there, closer in in the asteroid belt.

These air rocks, not gas, they could be Metal is well, but they are hard surfaces, and sometimes they come out of the asteroid belt, get closer to the surface of the earth, or at least our atmosphere.

If one or a piece of a smaller one called the Meteoroid hits the surface of the atmosphere, it turns into a meteor.

It gets bright because it hits our atmosphere and begins to burn up.

If it doesn't make its way all the way down to the surface, it turns into a shooting star.