Alien Comet Detected

Astronomers have detected bizarre swarms of comets around a nearby star, icy bodies that may have been trapped by the powerful gravitational pull of a huge, undiscovered exoplanet.

An international team of scientists spotted an enormous belt of carbon monoxide (CO) gas in the disk of debris surrounding Beta Pictoris, a young star that lies 63 light-years from Earth. The source of the gas is probably comets, and lots of them; one large comet must be getting destroyed every five minutes to keep replenishing the CO, which is destroyed by starlight, researchers said.

But the thinking changes if Beta Pictoris is determined to contain just a single comet swarm. In that case, the most likely explanation would be a mammoth smashup between two icy, Mars-size planets about 500,000 years ago, researchers said. Ongoing collisions among the fragments generated by this original crash could replenish the CO cloud.

The presence of CO around Beta Pictoris also suggests that the system may eventually become a good candidate to host life as we know it, researchers said.

"Carbon monoxide is just the beginning — there may be other more complex pre-organic molecules released from these icy bodies," co-author Aki Roberge, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.