{"id":248964,"date":"2025-02-28T17:34:09","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T17:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/28\/some-of-earths-meteors-are-probably-coming-all-the-way-from-a-neighboring-star-system\/"},"modified":"2025-02-28T17:34:09","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T17:34:09","slug":"some-of-earths-meteors-are-probably-coming-all-the-way-from-a-neighboring-star-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/28\/some-of-earths-meteors-are-probably-coming-all-the-way-from-a-neighboring-star-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of Earth\u2019s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png?ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Some of Earth\u2019s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system\" title=\"Some of Earth\u2019s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system \u2014 and even producing a few meteors in our sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2502.03224\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system<\/a>, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article-type\/deep-end-podcast?cta=top\">\n  <\/a><\/div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article-type\/deep-end-podcast?cta=top\">\n<\/a>\n\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  max-width: 100%;\n  height: auto;\n  clear: both;\n}\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>\u201cMost of [the objects] would be in the far reaches of the solar system,\u201d Gregg says. That puts them well beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they are mingling with the native objects in the sun\u2019s own Oort cloud of cometary bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Astronomers have only ever detected <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/interstellar-asteroid-might-have-just-been-spotted-first-time\">one interstellar asteroid<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/astronomy-interstellar-comet-space\">one interstellar comet<\/a> in our solar system. But neither came from Alpha Centauri.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just as Jupiter\u2019s gravity catapulted the two Voyager spacecraft onto interstellar trajectories, so the stars of Alpha Centauri and their planets should do the same to some of the comets and asteroids that swing around them. A small percentage of the ejected objects \u2014 0.03 percent \u2014 pass through our solar system, Gregg and Wiegert say, but none of the large bodies is close enough for telescopes to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, small particles from Alpha Centauri probably reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere, where they burn up. Gregg and Wiegert estimate that up to 10 meteors worldwide come from Alpha Centauri each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe expect these numbers to go up by about a factor of 10 when Alpha Centauri is closest,\u201d Gregg says. Alpha Centauri is racing toward us at 0.007 light-years per century (80,000 kilometers per hour) and will be closest 28,000 years from now, when it will be 3.2 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But 10 or even 100 meteors a year is a pittance compared with Earth\u2019s annual total of 7 trillion meteors. Furthermore, because Alpha Centauri lies far to the south, its meteors appear only in the far southern sky, out of sight of most people on Earth, Gregg and Wiegert say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cTheir calculations are right, but the problem hides basically in the assumptions,\u201d says Simon Portegies Zwart, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. We don\u2019t know the rate at which Alpha Centauri ejects material, he says, which means the actual number of interstellar objects coming from our near neighbor could be much greater or smaller than the study calculates. Nevertheless, the work demonstrates that our solar system is not an isolated object in space, he says. \u201cWe are connected to other objects \u2014 like Alpha Centauri, like other stars in the neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/comet-alpha-centauri-solar-meteor\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system \u2014 and even producing a few meteors in our sky. Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[6731,5043,91052,192889,964,1731],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248964"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248966,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248964\/revisions\/248966"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}