Earth isn’t flat, and shooting stars fly every direction | Fact check

The claim: The Earth is flat because we never see shooting stars coming from the bottom up

A June 24 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows an image of a body of water and what looks like a shooting star going up from the horizon. 

“This has NEVER happened,” the text onscreen reads. “If we live on a spinning ball in outer space, why is it then we NEVER see a random star falling UP from the horizon? Because the Earth is not a ball.”

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The post was shared more than 20,000 times in nearly a month.

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Our rating: False

Photographic evidence shows that shooting stars fly in all directions, including upwards from the horizon. And scientific evidence collected over centuries shows the Earth isn’t flat – it’s an oblate sphere.

Meteors ‘streak out’ in all directions

The Instagram post’s flat Earth claim rests on the idea that meteors, also known as shooting stars, never travel in an upward direction. But William Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, told USA TODAY that’s not true.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth passes through a trail of comet debris during its orbit, according to NASA. Cooke said in an email that meteor showers come from a point in the sky called a radiant.

When the radiant is on the horizon, Cooke said, “meteors streak out from the radiant in all directions, and some of these will indeed appear to be going straight up from the horizon. So, it is not true that meteors do not appear to be going up; some indeed have this appearance.”

In 2023, the Perseid meteor shower was captured in a time-lapse video that showed shooting stars flying from every angle, including straight up. Videos from Space.com and National Geographic also show meteors traveling in multiple directions. (A shower takes its name from the constellation where it’s located, like the Lyrids or the Perseids)

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The Instagram post’s claim of the Earth being flat can be debunked by geodesy, or the science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth’s geometric shape, orientation in space and gravity field.

The Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. Galen Scott, National Geodetic Survey constituent manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said studies over the centuries have shown that the Earth is an “‘oblate spheroid,” or a squashed sphere that is flattened at the poles.

“In fact, it was Sir Isaac Newton who proposed that the Earth is flattened at the poles due to its rotation, making it oblate, a theory that was confirmed by some epic surveys in Lapland and Ecuador in the 1730s – 40s,” Scott said.

USA TODAY has previously debunked other false flat Earth claims, including that an image of Chicago skyline taken in Indiana proves Earth is flat and another that stated Earth isn’t curved or moving.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Earth isn’t flat, and shooting stars fly every direction | Fact check