Quote:
Originally Posted by antoniseb
As I mentioned in another thread on this topic, I have assumed that this comet is a several kilometer wide dust ball sweeping through the asteroid belt. The chances of it hitting a 50 meter wide asteroid are small, but not that small. A fifty meter wide hunk of rock at a relative speed of five or ten kilometers a second would certainly be enough to eject a cloud that size.
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What about the fact that the same comet also exploded in 1892 or whenever it was? Wouldn't it seem a little bit too coincidental that the same comet would happen to hit two asteroids in the space of one century? I'm not all that well informed, though. Are collisions between comets and asteroids frequent or not?