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Although space is the emptiest vacuum that we know of, it is still far from being perfectly devoid of material. Debris from asteroid collisions and comet tails fill the Solar System and as the Earth circles the Sun, it sweeps up some of this debris. Although individual particle are typically smaller than grains of sand, they glow brightly as meteors when they strike the Earth at high speed and heat up in the atmosphere. Earth collects more than a ton of interplanetary debris every day.