An article in Popular Science written by astrophysicist Idan Ginsburg confirms that shooting stars are real. And they aren’t comets. They are actually hypervelocity stars.
In Medieval times (1550-1660) literature portrayed shooting stars as signs from the heavens that death and calamity were on the way. But by the late 19th century, scientists had established the truth.
Most people have shooting stars confused with comets. An explosion of light followed by bright trails of dust and clouds are often comets. And the light burns bright when pieces of space rocks and dust hit Earth’s atmosphere.
Ginsburg also studies celestial mechanics. He is an expert on how stars, planets and galaxies move throughout space. And he claims that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory confirmed a new hypervelocity classification of stars.
These are really stars, traveling at high speeds through the celestial universe. And sometimes they are followed by a trail of light consisting of dust, gas, and clouds. They “move with such incredible speed that they can escape the gravity of their home galaxies,” according to Ginsburg.
How a shooting star is born
In 1988, Jack Gilbert Hills, a Los Alamos National Lab theoretician proposed an interesting theory. He said that if two binary stars, gravitationally bound to each other, orbit a common center of mass and encounter a black hole, it would split them apart.
