I just read that meteors range in size from a small pebble down to a grain of sand, and that when we see them across the night’s sky (there’s a meteor shower due tonight) they’re between 50-75 miles above us. So how the hell does something so tiny make such a large, bright streak of light when it burns up?
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The small meteor is moving extremely fast and basically acting like a bus crashing into the molecules of the atmosphere. This makes it get exceptionally hot and disintegrate before hitting the ground if it isn’t large. Even a bird’s feather could act to kill someone if moved fast enough, and friction that creates heat in the atmosphere tends to be quadratic (meaning moving 2x faster means 4x the resistance) in spherical objects. Energy is ~ mass * velocity^2, so even a very light object moving very fast can have a considerable amount of kinetic energy. Meteors tend to be moving in the range of 10 _kilometers_ a second. This is of the order of the fastest ballistic missiles, and those are made to be very aerodynamic.
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