Phaethon

Okay kiddo, so you know how sometimes we see bright, streaky lights in the sky at night? Those are called shooting stars, but they're not really stars at all. They're actually tiny rocks flying around in space.

Now, there's a special kind of rock called an asteroid. Asteroids are bigger than shooting stars, but they're still way smaller than planets. One asteroid is called Phaethon, and it's special because it flies really close to the sun.

When Phaethon gets really close to the sun, it heats up and starts to give off dust and gas. This creates something called a meteor shower, where a bunch of shooting stars appear in the sky all at once!

Scientists like studying Phaethon because it's pretty unusual for an asteroid to do this. We can learn a lot about space from studying it, and we can even try to figure out how it got so close to the sun in the first place.

So next time you see a shooting star, just remember that it might actually be little pieces of a cool asteroid like Phaethon!