“Meteors, also known as shooting stars, are the visible paths meteoroids leave behind when entering Earth's atmosphere at a high velocity.”
—Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY, 30 Aug. 2023

The world fell quiet in 2020—but for us, it came alive at night.

It was during that faithful summer of Covid that we'd find a small freedom from lockdown, trading places with neighbors who rushed home with the setting sun. I'd breathe in the humid summer air that slowly descended upon starlit streets while my parents would dreamily recall the “sultry nights”—or "znoini noshti," as they're called in Bulgarian—that they’d spend partying at the golden beaches of the Black Sea, sprawled on the east side of the country where they grew up.

Then we would touch upon my father’s first love, astronomy, and our walk would turn into a galactic safari where each stop meant a meeting with a new celestial being and getting to know a new legend or myth. Inevitably, we'd journey toward the constellation (and the person) who my parents looked to for my name: Cassiopeia.

And my mom would insist, as she always will, that the Cassiopeia of myth did not sacrifice her daughter to a sea monster out of hasty selfishness; the unseen reality was that even mighty queens had to look wherever they could to protect their people. Sacrifice was the answer she found when she looked to the future, and it was the only hope she could hold onto to save her kingdom from Poseidon's wrath.

Then, out of nowhere, my father would startle us—“A shooting star, QUICK!” We'd skitter to a stop and search the bottomless ink-blue sky freckled with distant fluttering dots. My mom would yelp—“Oh my God, make a wish, make a wish, NOW!”—before we burst into laughter because, while trying to spot it, we’d miss the timing and it would disappear without anyone being able to “wish upon their star”.

And then my dad would talk about Perseus and the meteor showers, and we would discuss how ''shooting or falling star” is a misnomer—stars don't really "shoot" or "fall"—and we would try to figure out who coined this phrase, and why.

As it turns out, shooting stars (or rather, meteorites) enter our atmosphere more abundantly than I thought, with up to 50 tons worth of cosmic material coming in each day.

But people thought they were gloriously rare occurrences, and have been fascinated with them for centuries. The belief was that shooting stars were slivers of light from when the Gods would open their back doors to look down at Earth. And as the saying goes, if you make your wish before the door of opportunity closes, the God in question might even make it come true.

The first documented use of "shooting stars" in 1591 may have been an attempt to pick a piece of that wondrous myth, but stars have fallen for centuries before and since. Countless names and faces have been given to these peculiar rocks…so why should this one stay?

Shooting stars represent an irresistible cosmic wonder. The words bring to mind the image of sitting on a hill with a partner, marveling at the streaks of starlight dashing across studded skies—and the wonder that comes with quietly making a wish in its humbling glow. This setting, this feeling, this wish is reflected in countless movies, books, and shows; crescendos, wide shots, and paragraph breaks that give these cosmic curiosities a romance to them that has never worn off. It's a heartwarming indulgence, to let this wonder embrace you. One that brings the same precious comfort that a warm bed does to a frigid, sleepy morning.

But it's not for our sake alone that we should keep this name.

For centuries, cultures from all over the world looked to "shooting stars" for hope. The Native American Chumash are just one group that believes shooting stars to be the souls of their dead, flying across the sky towards the afterlife. Many Korean and Japanese myths portray shooting stars as godly messengers who bring predictions of tragedy or triumph to mortal interpreters, or grant them wishes. All are stories that attempt to find answers, hoping for a bright future to interpret or receive for themselves, or for loved ones who passed on to a world unexplained.

To truly commemorate this, then, we in the 21st century need to also reach back towards the past. With one hand, we could hold theirs that grasped at the stars in hopes of finding a path toward the future, making wishes and predictions as people do now. With the other, we could gesture towards the telescopes and technology that we use to calculate the evolution of galaxies—to read into both the future and the past.

I hope we never stop using this memorable phrase—to call the simple meteorite a shooting star would be to celebrate the wonder that people find in things bigger than themselves: the stars, the universe, and the passage of time.