New Evidence Hints All Comets in The Solar System May Come From The Same Place

[Judi Lynn]

DAN ROBITZSKI, FUTURISM
11 SEP 2019

All the comets in our Solar System may share the same origin story - and it could help explain how life on Earth came to exist.

A team of American and European scientists found that 14 different comets originated at the same time and place: a protoplanetary disk orbiting near our newly-formed Sun, according to research that'll be published by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Given that comet impacts are thought to be a potential source of organic materials on Earth, exploring this new cosmic origin story could lead to a better understanding of the origin of life.

This particular survey of 14 comets is too small in scale to use as evidence that all comets came from the same time and place in the early Solar System.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/birthplace-of-all-comets-could-hold-clues-to-origin-of-life

[Igel]

1. Yeah, there's that.

Not enough to say that all comets originated in the same time and place.

On the other hand, even with some sampling bias you'd have to think it's fairly unlikely that 14 would come from the same time and place. (Yes, sampling bias. They just saw those in a narrow time frame, and if something big was crunched and ejected mass into the inner system they'd likely show up at about the same time; that says little about the rest of the Oort cloud or comets that would have appeared in, oh, the last 4.5 by.)