How big was the biggest shooting star?

Answer 1

The vast majority of meteors are somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a grain of rice. Earth is hit by tens of thousands of these each and every day.

Probably only a few dozen per day are the size of a Baseball, and only a dozen or so per week are as big as a Basketball. Larger ones are even more rare.

Answer 2

The biggest shooting star, known as a bolide, can be as large as a meter in diameter, resulting in a bright fireball as it enters Earth's atmosphere. These spectacular events are rare but can be seen from great distances due to their size and brightness.

Answer 3

Our Sun is also a Star. Sun is much much bigger than Earth. All stars are like Suns in the sky. Most Stars are much much bigger than our Sun.

The Sun's diameter is 864,938 miles (1,391,980 km). This is almost 10 times larger than the planet Jupiter and about 109 times as big as the Earth. The volume of the Sun is 1,299,400 times bigger than the volume of the Earth; about 1,300,000 Earths could fit inside the Sun
In fact, if you think of the Sun as a basketball, the Earth would only be the size of the head of a pin

See the related link for a better idea.

Answer 4

Stars can range in so many different sizes, but even if they're huge, it doesnt mean that they're the hottest. Blue stars are the hottest stars.

Stars are categorized by size, the smallest being dwarf star, then orange giant (Pollux), red giant (Arcturus and Aldebaran), blue supergiant (Rigel), blue hypergiant (Pistol Star), red supergiant (Antares A, Mu Cephei), and red hypergiant, VY Canis Majoris, also known as the largest known star so far, with a diameter of 2.800.000.000 km. A passenger airplane flying along its surface at 900 km per hour would take 1100 years to circle one time!

Answer 5

Our Sun has a diameter of 1.4 million kilometers - 109 times the diameter of planet Earth. Most other stars are somewhat smaller; some are many times larger. Some of the largest stars have hundreds of times the diameter of our Sun.

Answer 6

Well it currently seems that there may be no limit to star, recently a star was discovered to be a whooping 4 solar masses at birth! thats 4 times the mass of the sun! such a star would have a radius equal to the distance between Jupiter and the sun. So its uncertain right now the limit of star size every day we see more mind boggling stuff!

Answer 7

The largest a star can be, due to the "Eddington luminosity" which states that a star cannot be any larger than 120 solar masses (120 times larger than our Sun).

This is because the outer layers would be expelled by the extreme radiation of the star.

This is for stars on the main sequence, stars can be larger when they turn into red giants, as in the largest star know - VY Canis Majoris. [See related question]

However, recent discoveries cast doubt upon the validity of the Eddington Limit and our understanding of solar physics. Star R136a1 is believed to be nearly 300 solar masses, and millions of times brighter than the Sun.

Answer 8

Most meteoroids that cause "shooting stars" are pebble-sized, a centimeter or so across.

Answer 9

The typical meteoroid is the size of a speck of dust. Only a small number of them get significantly larger than that.

Answer 10

Not so far as you would imagine. 'Shooting stars' are actually small meteors burning up in the atmosphere.