Questions From Readers

I love questions from my readers! So far I have received two, and I will answer one in this post. The other will have to wait a bit, it was pretty complicated. (It has to do with the space time continuum, in case you're curious.) But before I go on, I would like to reiterate that I love love love questions from readers. So ask away!
Flem in Santa Barbara, CA asks: "I need to know if it is possible that I saw a comet last weekend or if it was just an amazing shooting star that lasted for a couple of seconds."
Short answer: a meteor, not a comet.
Long answer: Comets are big balls of ice and dust (imagine a dirty snowball a few miles across) that orbit the sun in elliptical (oval-shaped) paths. As they orbit the sun, sometimes they are in a location where we can view them from Earth. When we see a comet in the sky, it looks like a kind of dim star with a faint tail behind it. Comets appear in the sky for weeks or even months, in pretty much the same spot night to night. Meteors are flashes of light created when specks of dust, most around the size of a grain of sand, enter the earth's atmosphere and the friction between air and the dust causes a tunnel of flames. (Contrary to the popular misnomer, meteors are not shooting stars at all; meteors=light from a speck of dust, stars=huge burning balls of gas a million miles across.)
So if you saw something bright flash across the sky and then disappear in a matter of minutes, I'm going to say it was a meteor and not a comet. It may have even been a stray Quadrantid.