Most Comets Crumble to Bits, Research Shows
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
When comets born at the edge of our solar system disappear from view, they don’t just lose their tails and go dormant; 99% of them crumble to bits, U.S. researchers reported in Friday’s issue of Science. “These objects are simply not where we expect them to be,” said Harold Levison, of the Southwest Research Institute, in a statement. “The only explanation that I can think of is that they go ‘poof.’ ”
The mystery of the missing comets has been debated for decades. Some astronomers theorized that most of those that issued from a cloud of comets known as the Oort cloud, at the edge of the solar system, eventually stopped producing their highly visible tails and went dormant, making them harder to detect.
