Where do meteor(ite)s come from

Question

I am reading a book (Dan Brown's Deception Point) where they find a meteor with signs of extra-terrestial fossils in it. (I understand that it is a fiction novel, but I know it is something that is really considered a possibility if there is life on other planets)

What I am wondering is, where do they originate from? I thought they are just rocks, not planets, in the solar system, some larger than others and they break apart and some enter into our atmosphere.

I would think that if it has life on it, it would have to come from a planet. But how would that happen?

If so, does that mean that there are possibly meteors that came from Earth out in the solar system with signs of our life on it?

Or is the meteor possibly once a small planet that got out of orbit and broke apart in space?

Answer 1

Next week we are heading in to the Perseid Meteor showers.   The shooting stars that you'll see are remnants of the comet Swift-Tuttle. It is thought that comets are out in the Kuiper Belt (out past Pluto), something happens to them, possibly bumping in to another object out there.  This sends it on in to the solar system, the Sun's gravitational pull brings it in.  When the comets get in around Mars you'll start to see the tail.  Comets have two tails, a blue ion tail and a white tail of debris.  Comets are 'dirty snowballs'.  A tail always points away from the Sun.  It's the debris that is the shooting stars that you'll be seeing next week.

Answer 2

space

Answer 3

Yes it is possible that a meteorite was once part of a small (dwarf) planet.

Meteorites come from asteroids, the moon and Mars.

But the asteroidal meteorites come in stony, stony-iron and iron types.

These are indicative of a small planet that was big enough to melt and have the metal sink to the center before being destroyed by a collision.

Then iron meteorites and the cores of destroyed planet(essimals)

and stony-irons and the core-mantle boundary.

This is backed up by the crystal structure of the iron meteorites, which have to cool slowly (over millions of years) to get crystal structure.

The meteorites from Mars have been reported to show fossil evidence of life, although that has been pretty much dismissed now it is certainly a possibility that fossils would survive...