Encounters of The Solar System With Molecular Clouds

The solar system has penetrated about 5 -- 10 giant molecular clouds over its history, and passes within 5 parsecs of a star-forming nebula every 100 million years or so. Numerical simulations of the effect of such encounters in perturbing the Oort cloud of comets are carried out using standard n-body computational techniques. It is found that the ingress of comets into the inner planetary system during such encounters amounts to factors of ∼100 over the average. During an encounter the impact rate of comets onto Earth increases by a comparable factor. The of ages of impact craters on the Earth is shown to be consistent with predictions from the model