I saw a shooting star tonight

Driving home from a little Cantina in Lampasas the other night, we saw a shooting star. Bright as the dickens all the way to the horizon when we lost sight of it. Because Texas has been so dry this year, we both feared the metorite might ignite additional grass fires. However, regarding a large grassfire in Australia in 2000, Jonathan Nally, editor of Sky and Space magazine said this:

"Meteorites tend to be cold, not hot. These things trundle through space at minus 150 degrees Celsius for billions of years.

"When they fall through the atmosphere they get hot on the outside, but only for a couple of seconds. Inside they are still bone cold."

After being slowed by the atmosphere, some 80 kilometres up, the tell-tale glow vanished.

"It is called dark flight. It takes many minutes more to fall to the ground, by which time the crust has cooled. People have been burnt picking up meteorites, not because they are hot, but because they are so cold."

I made a wish anyway.