Meteorites

Meteoroids entering our atmosphere are commonly called "shooting stars" or meteors. They are arriving all the time, but we usually only see them as a beautiful frictional firework display in the sky of a clear night. Bigger, but rarer, meteoroids may penetrate through to the surface of the earth, shedding droplets of molten skin along the way, and sometimes exploding either at impact or along the way, but finally coming to rest in the soil, where in time they will merge with earthly rocks through weathering. Those that reach the surface are called meteorites.