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comets

SPACE: Has Life From Earth Already Gone to the Stars?

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A pair of Harvard astrophysicists have proposed a wild theory of how life might have spread through the universe. Imagine this: Millions or billions of years ago, back when the solar system was more crowded, a giant comet grazed the outer reaches of our atmosphere. It was moving fast, several tens of miles above the Earth’s surface — too high to burn up as a fireball, but low enough that the atmosphere slowed it down a little bit. Extremely hardy microbes were floating up there in its path, and some of those bugs survived the collision with the ball of … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Detect a Swarm of Tiny Objects Orbiting an Alien Sun

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comets

There are tiny comets orbiting foreign suns. And human beings can detect them. Six times, about 800 years ago, dark things passed between the bright-yellow dwarf star KIC 3542116 and Earth. They were small in cosmic terms, about 330 billion tons (300 billion metric tons). That’s about the size of Halley’s Comet, or just one-245 millionth the mass of Earth’s moon. But they were big enough. They blocked a fraction of a fraction of the light that was streaming outward from that star. Eight hundred years later, the sensitive lens of the Kepler Space Telescope — a nearly meterwide piece … Read more