Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

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.