What is a meteor?

A meteor is a meteoroid – or a particle broken off an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun – that burns up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere, creating the effect of a "shooting star". Meteoroids that reach the Earth's surface without disintegrating are called meteorites. Where do they come from? read more

A meteorite is a portion of a meteoroid or asteroid that survives its passage through the atmosphere and hits the ground without being destroyed. Meteorites are sometimes, but not always, found in association with hypervelocity impact craters; during energetic collisions, the entire impactor may be vaporized, leaving no meteorites. read more

Before then, the streaks of light were considered only one of a variety of atmospheric phenomena, all of which bore the name meteor. Rain was an aqueous meteor, winds and storms were airy meteors, and streaks of light in the sky were fiery meteors. read more

From 2016 the Meteor Development Group (the open source organisation powering Meteor) started working on a new backend layer based on GraphQL to gradually replace their pub/sub system, largely isolated in the whole node.js ecosystem: the Apollo framework. read more