A meteor is the bright trail of a meteoroid, or piece of space debris, that we might see as it enters our atmosphere and becomes a line of luminous plasma. An estimated 25 million meteoroids, micro meteoroids and other space debris enter Earth's atmosphere each day, which results in an estimated 15,000 tonnes of that material each year. Most of the meteors visible to the naked eye are no more than particles of dust.

Sometimes if a meteoroid has sufficient mass, it makes it to the Earth's surface and is classified as a 'meteorite', The picture above is of an example meteorite held at the Visitors Centre in the Jodrell Plank Observatory's collection. It is a small part of a larger meteorite that fell to earth in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains (Russia) in 1947 and is an 'iron-nickel meteorite' (part of an asteroid's core)