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Thursday, July 28, 2011

New meteor shower points to a future close encounter

New meteor shower points to a future close encounter: "A pair of astronomers monitoring an all-sky camera got a surprise (PDF) when they checked data from last February: a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. After doing some calculations, they found that they probably come from a parent comet with an orbit that’s at least 53 years long. Moreover, the orbit of this comet crosses that of the Earth, meaning we may have a close encounter with this object sometime in the future."

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