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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Won't be Comets that Kill Us--At Least Not Simulated Ones

Crashing comets probably won't cause the end of life as we know it, a study said Thursday.

Astronomers at the University of Washington used computer simulation to model the evolution of comet clouds in the solar system over the past 1.2 billion years.

The simulation allowed them to peer into the Oort Cloud, a remnant of the nebula from which our solar system was formed.

"For the past 25 years, the inner Oort Cloud has been considered a mysterious, unobserved region of the solar system capable of providing bursts of bodies that occasionally wipe out life on Earth," said study author Nathan Kaib.

But the simulation found the Earth has likely only sustained two or three significant hits from comets in the past 500 million years.

link: Comets probably won't cause the end of life as we know it: study - Yahoo! Asia News


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