[Seruzawa]

So, they don’t have all the answers yet, eh?

[Vince Ferrer]

This seems ridiculous. Forgive my barely scientific explanation, but comets are not all the same, they have different orbits around the sun. Most are theorized to be from the oort cloud, far beyond the gas giants, at the edge of the solar system, and only very rarely dive into the inner solar system where they can be seen. These orbits would be in the hundreds of thousands years at minimum around the sun.

On the other hand, the asteroid belt is a bunch of debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Mars orbits the sun in about 2 years, and Jupiter in 12 years. This comet orbits the sun in 6.5 years.

So why would we be surprised that this comet is really like an asteroid? According to its orbit, it likely is an asteroid. The only thing that may be surprising is if asteroids can leave trails of gas in their orbits like comets.

[Ken H]

The rock dust closely resembles material from bodies called chondritic meteorites from asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, they reported in the journal Science.

What would they do for a chondrite bar!