Questions answered · Space and the Solar System

Can meteorites come from comets?

The short answer

Possibly, in rare cases, but no meteorite has been proven to come from a comet. Comet dust is fragile and fast, so it usually burns up as meteors, although some tiny dust particles collected in the stratosphere and in Antarctic snow are probably cometary.

Comets shed vast amounts of dust, and Earth runs through it every year, giving us meteor showers. Yet the stones in meteorite collections overwhelmingly trace back to asteroids. The reason lies in how cometary debris arrives. Shower meteoroids are mostly tiny, crumbly grains, and many strike the atmosphere at high speed: Perseid meteoroids, for example, hit at about 59 kilometres per second. Fragile material entering so fast is destroyed long before it can reach the ground.

The smallest particles are a different story. Grains less than a millimetre across can slow down gently enough to survive. High-flying aircraft have collected interplanetary dust particles in the stratosphere, and researchers recover micrometeorites from Antarctic snow and ice. Some of these, especially porous, carbon-rich particles, are thought to come from comets, and they match the dust that NASA's Stardust mission brought back from Comet Wild 2 in 2006. Those samples surprised scientists by containing minerals formed at high temperature near the young Sun, showing that material was mixed outwards across the early Solar System.

What about larger stones? Some researchers have suggested that the most primitive carbonaceous chondrites, such as the CI group that includes Orgueil, could come from extinct comets, or that a few unusual meteorites might be cometary. These are ideas under discussion, not established facts. The boundary between carbon-rich asteroids and old comets is blurry, which makes a definite answer hard.

So the honest answer is that comet material certainly reaches Earth as fine dust, and you may even find micrometeorites yourself, but a recognised cometary meteorite you can hold in your hand has not been confirmed. Sample-return missions and studies of fresh falls keep testing the question.

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