From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishmeteorme‧te‧or /ˈmiːtiə $ -ər/ noun [countable] HAa piece of rock or metal that travels through space, and makes a bright line in the night sky when it falls down towards the Earth Astronomers track large meteors using radar. a meteor shower (=a lot of meteors that fall down towards the Earth at the same time)
Examples from the Corpus
meteor• Peak rates are typically 50 to more than 100 meteors per hour.• The comets, meteors and other bodies were regarded as waste material.• From time to time Earth suffers bombardment from meteors and comets, and meteoritic impact has been a major planet-shaper and climate-modeller.• The special includes vivid illustrations of the impact meteors have had in the past and what could happen in the future.• The orbits of many other meteor swarms have been determined.• These few lucky observers had witnessed the most spectacular meteor shower in recorded history, surpassing even the 1833 Leonids.• The density of the atmosphere traversed by the meteor increases very rapidly as it nears the ground.• The meteors are debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, which last appeared in 1992.meteor shower• It is startling but true that no meteorite fall has ever been associated with a meteor shower.• No cometary meteor shower has ever produced a meteorite fall.• The random background meteors that do not belong to discrete meteor showers are called sporadic meteors.• Bundle up for the annual Geminid meteor shower, peaking around midnight Dec. 13.• You might have thought that no meteor shower, no space dist had ever touched that brilliance.• On some nights one can see so many of these popularly-called shooting stars that we speak of a star or meteor shower.• Interestingly, three regular meteor showers have orbits connected with three asteroids whose orbits bring them very close to Earth.• These few lucky observers had witnessed the most spectacular meteor shower in recorded history, surpassing even the 1833 Leonids.Origin meteor (1500-1600) French météore, from Medieval Latin meteorum, from Greek meteoron “something in the sky”, from meteoros “high in air” 