Paragraph on “Meteors and Meteorites” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Meteors and Meteorites

A meteor is what we commonly known as a shooting star. Millions of small pieces of rock, some only as large as a marble, are orbiting the sun. On occasions, one of these pieces enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The friction it experiences while passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, at a speed of over 50 kilometres per second, causes it to burn up leaving a trail of white light behind it and then it eventually disintegrates. There are rare occasions when the Earth cuts across the orbital path of a large number of these rocks as a result of which we see what we call a meteor shower. Such showers occur at the same time each year generally on the night of August 12 and 13.

Meteors generally burn up about 100 kilometres above the Earth’s surface but when the mass of the meteor is big then they don’t burn up in the atmosphere, instead they fall on the Earth’s surface. Such Meteors are known as Meteorites. The largest Meteorite is known to have fallen in Namibia in a place called Hoba. This meteor was about two meters in size. All across the world there are about 85 different locations which have very large sized craters which could have been the result of the impact from a heavenly body. There is a crater with a three kilometre diameter in Brazil which could have been the result of a meteorite hit about 200 million years ago. Another example is a crater 4000 feet across which was formed by a meteorite weighing more than 8,90,000 tons in the state of Arizona in United States of America. Meteorites are of two types—the first type are called ‘metallic meteorites’ because they have a large metal content which is mainly Iron and Nickel, the second type are called the ‘stony-meteorites’ because they are made up of rocks which are formed due to intense heat. Meteorites have a rough outer surface with crusts and indentations which are formed during their passage through the Earth’s atmosphere.