Consider it a long-lost cousin.
Consider it a long-lost cousin.
Astronomers say they discovered a rocky object, dubbed the “Manx comet” after the tailless cat, entering the inner solar system from the Oort Cloud.
What makes it of interest is it is made of the same material as other objects in the inner solar system and might have formed there when the Earth was just beginning.
Observations were made with the Very Large Telescope in Chile and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea.
Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy was the lead author of a paper published recently in the journal Science Advances on the discovery.
A press release says it is potentially one of the building blocks for Earth and other rocky planets that was expelled to the outer reaches of the solar system, where icy objects are mostly found.