The mysterious objects may be far more common than we thought and may have brought water to Earth.
In the darkness of space that surrounds Earth, a group of small, icy bodies are swarming after being expelled from the farther reaches of the solar system. The mysterious objects, which are not quite comets nor are they asteroids, could be one way that water ended up on Earth billions of years ago.
Asteroids are rocky bodies that orbit the Sun in the ring between Mars and Jupiter, they are close enough to the star for ice to turn into gas. Comets, on the other hand, are made of ice and dust. When they travel close to the Sun, their material starts to vaporize, forming a fuzzy tail known as a coma.
To determine the origin of dark comets, the researchers created models to simulate acceleration not related to gravity on different objects, tracing the path these objects would follow over a period of 100,000 years. They found that the main asteroid belt is the most likely source of objects that experience non-gravitational acceleration, and that most of the objects end up where dark comets are found today.
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