Comet Demolition Derby Around Star Surprises Scientists A young
star that is home to at least one alien planet is also ringed by
a vast, dusty cloud of comets, like our own solar system. But
there's a big difference: There may be as many as 83 trillion
comets there, with collisions destroying thousands each day, a
new study suggests. In fact, there is so much dust around the
star that the equivalent of 2,000 comets, each a half-mile (1
kilometer) wide, would have to have been obliterated every day
to create the icy dust belt seen today, researchers say. In an
announcement of the discovery, European Space Agency officials
dubbed the demolition derby a "comet massacre." The dust also
could have been created by few crashes of larger comets –
perhaps just two collisions every day between comets 6 miles
across (10 km) – but that's still a mind-boggling statistic,
they added. "I was really surprised," study leader Bram Acke of
the University of Leuven in Belgium said in a statement. "To me
this was an extremely lar