A team of astronomers using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope recently managed to identify a rain of comets striking the inner sections of a nearby solar system. According to experts, the event is reminiscent of the Late Heavy Bombardment, a similar event that affected our own solar system.
The event was discovered in the Eta Corvi star system, when Spitzer was used to analyze the light signature emitted by cosmic dust around the star. The results were presented on October 19, at the Signposts of Planets meeting at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The new discovery could imply that such comet bombardments are in fact common in newly-formed stellar systems. At the same time, it also means that water and proto-organic molecules could be taken to rocky exoplanets in the same way they were brought here.
As such, life may indeed be much more common in the galaxy and the Universe than first calculated.
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