Wishing on shooting stars is a tradition related to mankind’s fascination with the sky. Shooting stars are actually meteors, and wishing on them is considered lucky and challenging. The tradition of wishing on stars predates the 19th century nursery rhyme “Star Light, Star Bright.”
Most children are familiar with the superstition that a wish made on a shooting star will come true. While no one knows exactly where or when the tradition of wishing on a shooting star originated, it is undoubtedly related to the beauty and relative rarity of shooting stars and mankind’s enduring fascination with the sky. Stars have been associated with divine powers since ancient times, and even today some people associate shooting stars with angels, so wishing on a star can be like offering a prayer.
Shooting stars are actually not stars at all, but meteors. A meteor is the streak of light that appears in the sky when a meteoroid, a fragment in space, enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Most meteoroids that approach Earth burn up before reaching the planet’s surface, so shooting stars are often all people who see a meteoroid. Meteors appear to the human eye as incandescent lights similar in size and color to stars, so to the imagination or the uninformed, thinking of them as shooting or shooting stars is natural enough.
Shooting stars can be considered lucky and ideal to wish because they are relatively rare to see, especially in modern cities with significant light pollution, and because they come and go so quickly. Wishing for shooting stars is actually something of a challenge, since they disappear as soon as you see them. Therefore, it is difficult to refute the statement that wishes made on shooting stars come true.
A famous American nursery rhyme, “Star Light, Star Bright,” references the tradition of wishing on the stars, but the star in the poem is the “first star I see tonight” rather than a shooting star. “Star Light, Star Bright” is believed to date from the late 19th century, and while it is unknown whether or not the practice of wishing on stars predates the poem, it seems likely that people have wished upon those breathtaking and mysterious celestial bodies from well before recorded history.
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