Some of the land meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

Alpha Centauri, the nearest stars system in the sun, is probably pouring comets and asteroids into our solar system – and even producing some meteors in our sky.

Located only 4.3 years of light from the ground, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars rotating around each other. If Alpha Centauri has a cloud of remote comets as the Sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of West Ontario in London, Value in the work presented February 5 in Arxiv.org.

“Most of [the objects] It would be at the distant levels of the solar system, “Gregg says. This makes them beyond Pluto’s orbit, where they are mixing with local objects in the clouds of comet bodies.

Astronomers have sometimes discovered only one inter -stellar asteroid and an inter -stellar comet in our solar system. But he didn’t even come from Alpha Centauri.

Like Jupiter’s gravity catapulted two Voyager ships on the starry trajectories, so the stars of Alpha Centauri and their planets should do the same with some of the comets and asteroids that swing around them. A small percentage of extracted objects – 0.03 percent – pass through our solar system, say Gregg and Wiegert, but none of the large bodies are close enough to see telescopes.

However, small particles from Alpha Centauri probably reach the Earth’s atmosphere where they burn. Gregg and Wiegert estimate that up to 10 meteors around the world come from Alpha Centauri every year.

“We expect these numbers to grow by about a factor 10 when Alpha Centauri is the closest,” Gregg says. Alpha Centauri is competing towards us with 0.007 light years for century (80,000 kilometers per hour) and will be the nearest 28,000 years from now, when it will be 3.2 years of light from Earth.

But 10 or even 100 meteors per year is a stake compared to the annual total of 7 trillion meteor. Moreover, because Alpha Centauri lies away south, its meteors appear only in the distant southern sky, out of the eyes of most people on Earth, say Gregg and Wiegert.

“Their calculations are fair, but the problem is essentially hidden in assumptions,” says Simon Portries Zwart, an astronomer in the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. We do not know the degree by which Alpha Centauri derives material, he says, which means that the current number of inter -star objects coming from our near neighbor may be much larger or smaller than the study calculates. However, work shows that our solar system is not an isolated object in space, he says. “We are connected to other objects – like Alpha Centauri, like other stars in the neighborhood.”