Some of Earth's Meteors Are Probably Coming All the Way From a Neighboring Star System

upstart writes:

The number of interstellar objects coming from Alpha Centauri will increase over time:

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system - and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant 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 Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org.

"Most of [the objects] would be in the far reaches of the solar system," Gregg says. That puts them well beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they are mingling with the native objects in the sun's own Oort cloud of cometary bodies.

Astronomers have only ever detected one interstellar asteroid and one interstellar comet in our solar system. But neither came from Alpha Centauri.

Just as Jupiter's gravity catapulted the two Voyager spacecraft onto interstellar trajectories, so the stars of Alpha Centauri and their planets should do the same to some of the comets and asteroids that swing around them. A small percentage of the ejected objects - 0.03 percent - pass through our solar system, Gregg and Wiegert say, but none of the large bodies is close enough for telescopes to see.

Still, small particles from Alpha Centauri probably reach Earth's atmosphere, where they burn up. Gregg and Wiegert estimate that up to 10 meteors worldwide come from Alpha Centauri each year.

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