A team of scientists has discovered six exocomets
outside our solar system.
Research astronomer Barry Welsh at the University of
California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory looks for these comets spinning
in elliptical orbits around distant stars, leaving their trademark trails of
star-lit gas and debris.
The icy dirt balls - between just five kilometers
and 20 kilometers across - emerge from massive discs of gas and dust around the
stars, the raw material for new planets. Welsh said the exocomets are formed
from these scraps left over from planet formation.
“This is like the missing link, the missing piece in
the puzzle. And it reinforces all the planetary formation theories because all
the planetary formation theories say you should end up with left-over comets
and left-over big hunks of rock, asteroids, and that sort of thing,” he said.
Sources :
http://www.voanews.com/content/comets_discovered_around_solar_systems/1582455.html
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