Why do some stars fall at night in the sky?

This is one of the questions I grew up with, especially each time I see a falling star at night. I kept asking this question until I was told that the falling of a star always resulting in a loss of life.

Though, some cultures like the Swabians in Germany believe that a shooting star brings good luck and that it signaled a year of good fortune and luck. However, they believe that once you saw three meteors in a night, then death was upon you. Most times, falling stars were not always seen as a good omen. Some ancient cultures have believed that meteors are a display of anger from their gods.

Ooh! How can it be? How many stars will fall this night? Should I not look at the sky again? Hope my star will not fall now? These were among my questions and responses after I was told that a falling star always results in loss of life, in fact, I used to feel unhappy and having the fear of a falling star since it correlates with a bad omen.

_{By Bautsch [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons}

Not quite long to that event, I graduated from that misery to the story of how humans relied on nature and existing things around them in order to forecast and make certain predictions about the future and their various choices. They do this by paying attention to nature and looking up always to the heavens for clues from the stars.

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Does a star really fall at night in the sky?

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In order to answer this question, having a clear understanding of how enormous a star is, will help a lot.

How does a star look like?

_{source nasa.gov}

This diagram above shows a brown dwarf star in relation to Earth, a low-mass star, Jupiter and the sun. It was observed that Stars with less mass than the sun are usually smaller and cooler, which become much fainter in visible light. Brown dwarfs stars are the smallest and coolest of stars. They have less than eight-percent of the sun's mass. _{source from NASA}

Scientists have made it known that the size of a star is not only larger but it is more massive than the Earth and all it contains. No doubt, stars are bigger than the so-called ‘planets’. The Comparison between the Stars and the Earth is just like a drop of water in an ocean, a dot in the vast expanse of space, as you can see in the NASA image above.

In fact, there are many other objects aside from stars in the universe that can wreak havoc in our solar system. Objects like rogue planets, Brown dwarves, a small black hole, an inactive neutron star, a cosmic bombardment of comets from the outer reaches of our solar system, etc. Though, the chances of any of these scenarios to actually materialize are extremely low.

_{(By cmglee, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link)}

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The Science Behind a falling Stars

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With the enormous size of the star described above, one can say capital No, that stars don't fall, since a star is much larger and more massive than the Earth, then how will it fall within the earth. In fact, if it will happen, then one would expect to see it happen not in one's lifetime but in advance. Since stars are very bright in nature. It will be seen coming slowly closing in from very far away and of course will not move fast enough as it used to be.

No object in the universe can fall onto another object with more massive than itself, so star doesn't fall on earth, a star can fall onto another star or onto a black hole but not on earth.

Any object in the universe can fall onto another object that is more massive than itself, the opposite cannot happen. However, planets like Earth can fall onto stars.

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Research has revealed that there are many small chunks of rock residing in the space. Although stars and planets are easily seen in the night sky, both stars and planets are not the only physical things present in space. There are various small bits of rocks moving around too in space.

As the Earth revolves around the Sun, it will collide with some of these chunks of rocks with the presence of an atmosphere and at a greater velocity. As they pass through the atmosphere they definitely begin to heat-up, gradually start to glow and finally burn down. Indeed, this is what we usually see at night when we look at the sky and this call a meteor.

Millions of these particles collide with one another and the atmosphere every day, but only visible at night and one can only look at a small and specific part of the sky at a time, if one maintains a constant look at the sky, one can expect to see a shooting star every 10 to 20 minutes. This is because, at night, we are directly facing the direction in which the Earth is revolving, so we intercept more of the stuff in space.

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Conclusion

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At night, it always look like we are seeing only stars and planets in the night sky, but both are not the only physical things in space, there are chunks of rocks moving around. Some of the chunk rocks are tiny in nature and some are large, their collision with the atmosphere always result in the so-called 'Meteors' (shooting stars or falling star), which has nothing to do with stars itself but everything to do with these little chunks of rock. These shooting stars operate in the space and will never reach the ground because an object must be a few feet across to have any hope of reaching the ground before melting or burning up, especially metals like nickel-iron.

In case you are asked to explain why stars fall at night in the sky? am sure you know the right response now

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Thanks for reading through, your thoughts are important.
Until my next post,
keep on sending zeroes and ones.

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References
_{Top 10 cool things about stars
Are the Stars Bigger Than the Earth?
Is it possible that one star is larger than the earth?
4 superstitious beliefs about meteorites
What happen if a star falls from the sky?
10 Superstitions About Stars
What does it mean when seeing a star falling from sky in the right hand side?}

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_{All images are from free source websites}

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