A streaking meteor, splitting off from Comet's decade-long identity crisis, final in Emoji 18.0 since Unicode 18.0 was published on September 16, 2026. As of September 25, 2026, no phone or computer shows it by default. Click to copy the codepoint anyway.
Meteor (, U+1FA8B) is one of the nine new emoji in Emoji 18.0, the emoji companion to Unicode 18.0, which the Unicode Consortium published on September 16, 2026. It depicts a streaking fireball entering the atmosphere, and it exists specifically to fix a vendor rendering split that's dogged the existing Comet emoji (☄️) since its debut: some platforms drew Comet as a blue, sparkling ice ball, while others redesigned it as a red-hot rock mid-impact, two genuinely different concepts sharing one codepoint. Unicode's own announcement put it plainly: "wishing on a star and witnessing an extinction-level event are two entirely different energies." Meteor takes over the fireball meaning so Comet can settle back into a consistent blue-ice design everywhere. It was a draft candidate until that release; Unicode's final emoji data now lists U+1FA8B as "meteor", fully qualified and marked E18.0. Google has already drawn it for Noto Color Emoji, but as of September 25, 2026, no operating system, keyboard or system emoji font ships it, so expect a blank box or placeholder glyph for now. Emojipedia estimates, from last year's rollout pattern, that WhatsApp, Samsung and Google Android add it in the first quarter of 2027, Apple around March or April 2027, and Microsoft in late summer or early fall 2027.
The Emoji 18.0 character itself: copy the codepoint today and it draws as a meteor once your platform's emoji font catches up.
Need more than this one? Browse the full set in Weather Symbols →
Already-encoded celestial emoji that Meteor is most often compared to, or accused of overlapping with.
Meteor isn't the only character Emoji 18.0 made final: these became part of the standard with it on September 16, 2026, and most screens can't draw them yet either.
Meteor's final name and codepoint, U+1FA8B meteor marked E18.0, are listed in Unicode 18.0's emoji-test.txt data file. The Unicode Consortium's Unicode 18.0 announcement confirms the release date, September 16, 2026, and its nine new emoji. Emojipedia reported Google's Noto Color Emoji designs and published the 2027 platform estimates quoted above.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →Sun, rain, snow, and every already-encoded celestial character, including Comet.
The new Emoji 18.0 face that won the public vote.
Another new Emoji 18.0 emoji, reassigned from a deferred Apple Core proposal.
All 9 emoji that became final in Emoji 18.0, ranked by public vote.
A new Unicode 18.0 character, published 16 September 2026.