Another mainstream theory ruptured it would seem. At https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2019/12/02/astronomers-see-stars-slingin… … stars and comets as dance partners, linked into a gravitational celestial interaction that was predicted by Oort many moons ago. Polish astronomers have captured images of two nearby passing stars that seem to pluck up comets and then swing them into an orbit around our star, the Sun (entering our solar system). Astronomers think the Oort Cloud is out there on the edge of the solar system (or just beyond it). This icy reservoir of cosmic objects, the comets, is thought to represent the leftovers of the star and planet building process in our solar system – since the 1950s when first promulgated by Oort. One of the mantras of mainstream was that passing stars were able to pick up the odd comet and fling it inwards into the solar system – in order to account for the presence of comets, a peculiarity in an otherwise stable, or apparently so, system of orbiting planets and asteroids. Comets are what the ancient Babylonians called wild sheep – sheep (or lights in the sky) behaving in an odd manner (not revolving in a regular manner but appearing out of deep space unexpectedly, and from unaccountable directions). They are a bit like the joker in Morris dance, an odd man out who interferes with the other dancers in their set routine. A new paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (available currently on the arxiv pre-publication web site) has looked at images and data from the Gaia spacecraft and from the PanSTARRS array. They claim to have found 2 instances of stars nudging the orbits of comets and sending them in the direction of the solar system. However, we observe dozens of comets every year, they add, and therefore the mechanism they have seen is not sufficient to generate all these comets every year. The mechanism is not performing as mainstream theorise. It is inadequate.
Meanwhile, at https://phys.org/news/2019-12-minimoon-fireball.html … what is a mini moon? Apparently, it is a meteor captured by the gravity of the Earth, circling the planet for a number of occasions before escaping back into space, winging away elsewhere.