Meteorites often come from asteroids, though a few originated on Mars or the Moon.

The longer version

Most meteorites are fragments chipped off asteroids by collisions, which then drift until Earth's gravity captures them. Their internal textures record slow cooling and, in some cases, melting inside a parent body long ago. Iron meteorites come from cores that once melted.

A small number carry chemical signatures matching Mars or the Moon, identified by trapped gas and mineral patterns. Those pieces were blasted off their parent worlds by large impacts and traveled through space before landing. Finding them lets geologists study other worlds without sending a spacecraft. Most burn brightly during entry and land as dark, fused stones.

Where this entry sits

The night sky looks calm, yet almost everything up there is moving, burning, or slowly changing. These facts cover planets, stars, the Moon, gravity, black holes, comets, and the story of how people began exploring beyond Earth. The full list sits on the Space and Sky page, where every entry is listed in order.