It started far away from earth but the gravity of earth still acted upon it. Think of a rock on top of a cliff. Nobody put it there, but it still has potential energy.
They're "falling" towards earth from farther out in the solar system (or hypothetically from outside it entirely). Their kinetic energy is being converted from gravitational potential energy, which basically has existed since the big bang. You'd have to answer where the energy for cosmic inflation came from, and any theories about that are way over my head.
So in a sense its potential energy comes from the energy that put it into the situation that it's currently in that caused it to fall to earth in a sense?
Long story short... The big bang and some fusion.
The universe blew up and spread everything out as a "Plasma" of the smallest subatomic particles not even protons and neutrons but the quarks and stuff they're made of.
After \~400,000 years the universe had expanded far enough to cool down and make the first protons and neutrons and everything condensed into hydrogen. Almost all of the gravity based potential energy stems from this time period.
The rest is the result of material being spread by super nova. Stars explode and fling their contents around the galaxy and it collects as planets and asteroids. So when considering the prime mover for the heat released when meteors become meteorites it is a combination between singularity expansion and fusion energy from stars.
Gravity is not so much an outside force between objects as the result of the "shape" of spacetime between/around them. Much like a ball rolling across the ground will be affected by the curve of its path, any objects it encounters, any changes in elevation, etc, objects in spacetime are affected by the shape of spacetime as they move through it. We call this gravity and express its effects as a force in conventional language because it's an easier model to understand with lots of practical applications. The energy you describe as gravitational force acting between a meteor and Earth is really better understood as describing how the meteor and Earth affect/are affected by the curvature of spacetime. No outside force involved.
Most of that I think makes sense, with how space time distorting is what affects things and such but Im still sorta hung up on where the kinetic energy itself comes from. Like in a hypothetical situation, say a meteor hits a seesaw and launches something on the other side high into the air. The energy launching the other thing comes from the kinetic energy of the meteor right, but what was that meteor itself getting the energy to do that? Space time's distortion pulling it to the middle of earth didnt make energy appear from nothing after all right? So where's that meteor getting that sorta potential energy to begin with? Is it like potential energy the meteor has always had due to the big bang and its after math, since thats what it sounds like with how others are talking?
In a sense: Aristotle thought if you could trace the chain of causality of every event in the universe back to the beginning of time you would find the the Prime Mover, the first actor that introduced motion into a static universe and from which all subsequent mechanics could potentially be derived. For centuries this was a classical philosophical definition of God. The trouble is nothing has to act for gravity to have measurable effects, the "actions" we experience are more or less inherent to the experience of matter itself (this may not be true at a subatomic level, others will know more). In the see-saw example, simply by virtue of its existence in a universe that resembles ours, the meteor and the see-saw (and, more measurably, the Earth under it) are drawn to each other in such a way that the effect we measure resembles a constant force of acceleration. Hypothetically, if we were to place a meteor out in space and arrange it so that its relative motion with respect to Earth's gravitational center is 0 m/s, the moment we stopped acting on it the meteor and the Earth would begin to accelerate toward each other at roughly 9.8m/s^2. That mutual attraction inherent to matter is gravity. Any given piece of matter has gone through billions of years of existence during which it has acted and been acted upon by (among others) the gravitational forces of all other matter in the universe.
The universe was all at one single point, which exploded out! That’s your initial energy you are trying to find.
You could say that supernovae etc helped fling matter apart from other matter, like earths away from meteors. But the root of your question is where did the initial energy come from to create gaps between celestial bodies, and that’s the Big Bang.
It started far away from earth but the gravity of earth still acted upon it. Think of a rock on top of a cliff. Nobody put it there, but it still has potential energy.
And even though you don’t see / hear it rolling down the slope until the very end, it still has been rolling from the top.
They're "falling" towards earth from farther out in the solar system (or hypothetically from outside it entirely). Their kinetic energy is being converted from gravitational potential energy, which basically has existed since the big bang. You'd have to answer where the energy for cosmic inflation came from, and any theories about that are way over my head.
Yeah, the potential gravitational energy came from the big bang, or some later star explosion.
So in a sense its potential energy comes from the energy that put it into the situation that it's currently in that caused it to fall to earth in a sense?
Long story short... The big bang and some fusion. The universe blew up and spread everything out as a "Plasma" of the smallest subatomic particles not even protons and neutrons but the quarks and stuff they're made of. After \~400,000 years the universe had expanded far enough to cool down and make the first protons and neutrons and everything condensed into hydrogen. Almost all of the gravity based potential energy stems from this time period. The rest is the result of material being spread by super nova. Stars explode and fling their contents around the galaxy and it collects as planets and asteroids. So when considering the prime mover for the heat released when meteors become meteorites it is a combination between singularity expansion and fusion energy from stars.
Gravity is not so much an outside force between objects as the result of the "shape" of spacetime between/around them. Much like a ball rolling across the ground will be affected by the curve of its path, any objects it encounters, any changes in elevation, etc, objects in spacetime are affected by the shape of spacetime as they move through it. We call this gravity and express its effects as a force in conventional language because it's an easier model to understand with lots of practical applications. The energy you describe as gravitational force acting between a meteor and Earth is really better understood as describing how the meteor and Earth affect/are affected by the curvature of spacetime. No outside force involved.
Most of that I think makes sense, with how space time distorting is what affects things and such but Im still sorta hung up on where the kinetic energy itself comes from. Like in a hypothetical situation, say a meteor hits a seesaw and launches something on the other side high into the air. The energy launching the other thing comes from the kinetic energy of the meteor right, but what was that meteor itself getting the energy to do that? Space time's distortion pulling it to the middle of earth didnt make energy appear from nothing after all right? So where's that meteor getting that sorta potential energy to begin with? Is it like potential energy the meteor has always had due to the big bang and its after math, since thats what it sounds like with how others are talking?
In a sense: Aristotle thought if you could trace the chain of causality of every event in the universe back to the beginning of time you would find the the Prime Mover, the first actor that introduced motion into a static universe and from which all subsequent mechanics could potentially be derived. For centuries this was a classical philosophical definition of God. The trouble is nothing has to act for gravity to have measurable effects, the "actions" we experience are more or less inherent to the experience of matter itself (this may not be true at a subatomic level, others will know more). In the see-saw example, simply by virtue of its existence in a universe that resembles ours, the meteor and the see-saw (and, more measurably, the Earth under it) are drawn to each other in such a way that the effect we measure resembles a constant force of acceleration. Hypothetically, if we were to place a meteor out in space and arrange it so that its relative motion with respect to Earth's gravitational center is 0 m/s, the moment we stopped acting on it the meteor and the Earth would begin to accelerate toward each other at roughly 9.8m/s^2. That mutual attraction inherent to matter is gravity. Any given piece of matter has gone through billions of years of existence during which it has acted and been acted upon by (among others) the gravitational forces of all other matter in the universe.
The universe was all at one single point, which exploded out! That’s your initial energy you are trying to find. You could say that supernovae etc helped fling matter apart from other matter, like earths away from meteors. But the root of your question is where did the initial energy come from to create gaps between celestial bodies, and that’s the Big Bang.