🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <56q4qc$iob@nntp.seflin.lib.fl.us>,
Ralph Silverman <z007400b@bcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us> wrote:
>	left over?
>	huh?
>	generally,
>	this stuff is metamorphic blobs ...
>	it melted and recongealed ...

No. With the possible exception of Mars meteors, no known meteors
are metamorphic (rock which formed and was later melted and recrystalized.)
Most are undifferentiated and consistent with rock which formed by
gradual accumulation from relatively low velocity collisions (generally
enough to at least partially melt the rock.) That's just small rocks
hitting each other and sticking together, and nothing like what you'd
expect from a broken up planet. Meteors are (in most cases) believed
to come from the asteroid belt, and represent pieces of asteroids 
broken off by higher energy impacts. The spectra of asteroids matches
this theory. So the asteroid belt really does look like left over
remnants from the formation of the solar system, pieces that
never grew to the size of a planet because of perturbations from
Jupiter's gravity. There are some exceptions, notably 4 Vesta,
which looks like it _may_ have once part of a larger body. But
those are a small fraction of all asteroids, and given the mass
of the asteroid belt, the hypothetical parent body wouldn't have
been of planetary size. (Even when you add in the fact that the
asteroid belt was more massive in the past, the parent body would
probably still have been of less than lunar mass.)

                                                         Frank Crary
                                                         CU Boulder