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The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
- madlag 9y agoWhat a pity they did not call it Rama ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama
- Batro 9y agoCame here for that comment!
- yvdriess 9y agoSpoilers! ;)
- Grangar 9y agoWould be interesting if it changed course.
- Jyaif 9y ago"interesting" is an understatement. We'd instantly have a new space/weapon race.
- Unbeliever69 9y agoThe premise of Saturn Run
- mseebach 9y agoThe Economist had the same thought: https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730863-rendezvous-rama-first-visitor-another-solar-system-has-just-been https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/217308...
- i_feel_great 9y agoIt could very well be vampires[0]. So please leave it alone. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Vampires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Vampires
- Cal___ 9y agoI think it's a shame that this story hasn't gotten more attention. True, it doesn't tell us as much about the nature of the universe as the discovery of the Higgs boson, and it doesn't represent a major advance in engineering like gravitational wave detection. But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't come until we send a probe to Proxima Centauri. To me, the thought of an asteroid being hurled out of the solar system that created it, then traveling through the cold void for millions or possibly billions of years, and then whipping around the sun (a mere 0.25 AU distant) is just the most incredible thing. The whole world should be having parties in its honor, to wish it well as it leaves us behind. (Instead of just fighting each other over nothing, as we usually do.) This is an amazing time to be alive.
- kobeya 9y agoYou might like the book Rendezvous with Rama.
- Timothycquinn 9y agoI liked the whole Rama series. When I heard of the suggested dimensions of this object, I immediately thought of Rama.
- ISL 9y agoEverything in threes.
- cperciva 9y agoIt might not tell us as much about the nature of the universe, but good observations of this and future visitors could tell us a lot about the nature of other solar systems. So far we've generally assumed that solar systems are pretty similar in how they form, without much evidence beyond a few simple models; seeing debris from other solar systems could do a lot to confirm or refute that hypothesis.
- Cyphase 9y ago
- stmfreak 9y agoElongated is not a very natural shape for rocks in space. It is going to get real interesting if this thing starts slowing down.
- known 9y agoI don't think we earthlings are constantly watching every corner of our solar system.
- org3432 9y agoFamous last words?
- Santosh83 9y agoFound to be among the most elongated deep space objects known: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42053634 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42053634 Can't help but think of the Chindi!
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago"This artist's concept shows [...]" F you artists concept. Drawing fantasy pictures in news messages is not ok. + I'm no grammar guy, nor a native speaker, but "artists's" is wrong, isn't it?
- nothrabannosir 9y agoArtist’s is fine (“artist his”), artists’s would be artists’. Depends on how many people worked on the art piece :)
- pgalu 9y agoFor the record, the expansion "... his" is considered "folk etymology": a reanalysis from the Early Modern English period in the language's history. Notice for example how it doesn't make sense for feminine words: "Mary's house". In fact, the possessive "'s" is a leftover from Old English, where the inflectional suffix "es" marked the genitive case.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoYeah it's a mnemonic device, nonetheless quite useful to explain the rule.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoThanks!
- coldtea 9y ago>Drawing fantasy pictures in news messages is not ok. You are aware that astronomers and universities and even NASA regularly collaborate with such artists to create photorealistic simulations of planets, moons, and similar objects, and that lots of information and striving for accuracy goes into making those pictures right? Plus, when they say "artist" they don't mean they asked some Picasso to make a drawing of the object for art's sake, but tasked someone (graphic designer etc) to make a realistic depiction of it given the data they know.
- z3t4 9y agoHow close to earth did it pass ? A possible extinction event just flew bye and there where nothing we could do about. Btw, that looks like a gravity assist/slingshot ...
- Tossrock 9y ago0.16 AU, according to the paper.
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoFor comparison, the Earth's radius is 0.00004 AU. This is like a mosquito passing your car at a closest distance of 2 miles.
- wallace_f 9y ago~395 earth-moon distances away and 1/20th the size of the object that killed the dinosaurs
- Jyaif 9y ago1/20th the size, but 4 time the speed. Assuming the density of the 2 objects were the same, and because energy is proportional to the square of speed, it would cary a similar amount of energy.
- robodale 9y ago...but I still have mosquitos hitting my windshield. Hopefully there are not many more objects like that asteroid inbound...
- jerf 9y agoIf you want to worry about asteroids impacting the Earth, it's very inefficient to worry about it one interstellar object at a time. Here's a nicely organized list for you with some history, to let you efficiently worry at scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale#Objects_with_non-zero_Torino_ratings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale#Objects_with_non-...
- Tossrock 9y agoI recommend anyone interested read the paper which is available as a preprint from Nature (for the moment): goo.gl/cSsHoj (link shortened due to having an embedded access token). Some tantalizing points from the paper: - They constrained the aspect ratio in two dimensions to be 10:1:C, but the third dimension is unconstrained. Depending on which axis the object is rotating around, C could either be 1, or 20. Either of these would be an essentially unique object within the solar system. This is a really weird shape. - If the object is rotating around its short axis, it must have internal tensile strength (ie, it's a solid object, not just a pile of dust/gravel accreted by gravity). Lower bound on the required tensile strength is 3 Pascal (very little). - There is essentially no dust/ice on the object - less than 1 kg within 2.5". So it's not a comet, and would have to be asteroidal. This conflicts with our current understanding of what objects would be in interstellar space. Current models have almost all objects ejected from our system being icy comets. This object would be analogous to a Manx comet, ie a rocky asteroid in a highly elliptical long period orbit. - The shape of the observed light curve deviates from the best-fit triaxial ellipsoid in a way that suggests large flat or concave sections. It would take unrealistically large albedo variations to produce the same deviation without flat/concave sections. And of course, of all the planets in the solar system, it made its closest approach to Earth, an astronomical "near miss" at just 0.16 AU :)
- robin_reala 9y agoAnd of course, of all the planets in the solar system, it made its closest approach to Earth, an astronomical "near miss" at just 0.16 AU That is presumably because there’re lots of these objects, but we can only detect the ones closest to us.
- Tossrock 9y agoThe authors estimate that there is ~1 such object within 1 AU of the sun at any given time. So, more common than we previously expected, but not exactly teeming. You're right that it was detected due to its nearness though - it was picked up in a routine near-Earth object survey by Pan-STARRS
- sanatgersappa 9y agois it looking for whales?
- nichtich 9y agoIf there're a lot of these objects entering and leaving solar system every year, and suppose some day in the near future we can keep track of them all, can we use them for us to send out larger probes? We see a rock coming near us, and send out a probe to its path. And before the collision the probe create a buffer object at the rear end so that it wouldn't be totally destroyed. After that the probe can free ride for a while at a high speed and re-ignite when it decides to go a separate path.
- KnightOfWords 9y agoThere is no benefit to this I'm afraid. To take a ride on it you first have to match velocities, so you've already done the work to chase it down. Gravity assist maneuvers are the best option we currently have for launching probes into interstellar space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
- wallace_f 9y agoHmm, accelerating such probe to the speed of the fastest man-made object ever made, Voyager 1 (17km/s), and using a 1-kilometer buffer object with linear acceleration with the asteroid (26km/s) we get >4,000gs. What about elastic bands 100s of kms long? Probably no material strong enough, elastic or not.
- Cyphase 9y agoNot sure about a buffer object, but a tether on a reel might work. You harpoon the object, then let it pull the probe, giving lots of slack according to the engineering tolerances of the harpoon in the object (don't want it to come loose), the tether (don't want it to snap), the reel (don't want it to spin apart or get stuck or any one of a number of things), and the probe (don't want it damaged under extreme acceleration). With enough tether and a low-enough-friction reel with magnetic bearings (think of the ungodly RPMs), you can accelerate the probe at almost any speed you'd like, within reason, although it would be best to accelerate as quickly as possible without risking. And remember that you only need to get the whole harpoon/tether/reel (HTR, or HiTchhikeR; you saw it here first) mechanism in range of the object as it passes by, so it can be bulkier than you would put on a probe moving under its own power. Or you could start off as usual, maybe with a gravity assist, which would allow for a less sophisticated HTR. Then if you want to be clever, you can turn all those RPMs into stored energy. But that might not be worth the trouble.
- vortico 9y agoWhat was its speed at closest sun approach? Because the speed of objects in our solar system are all very low compared to the speed of the nearest solar system compared to our sun, I imagine this could also be the fastest object ever to be obversed in our solar system.
- Tepix 9y agoIts speed peaked at 87.71 km/s at perihelion.
- planteen 9y agoIt looks like there was a sungrazer comet an order of magnitude faster than that at 600 km/s (2.16e6/3600), so this was not the fastest solar system object ever. https://futurism.com/the-sun-just-killed-the-fastest-moving-object-in-the-solar-system/ https://futurism.com/the-sun-just-killed-the-fastest-moving-...
- erikb 9y agoI don't get the excitement. I thought it's common that stones of different sizes enter our solar system take a loop and exit again. That's exactly what this tourist plans on doing, or not? What's different?
- Santosh83 9y agoYes but this is the first observed instance of a stone that seems to come from outside the solar system and outside the Oort Cloud even, so basically from interstellar space. And its shape and albedo or unusual too, seemingly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ForFreedom 9y agoNow, what if it turns out to be an alien ship?
- mrfusion 9y agoDid anyone check if it is rotating and at the right rpm to produce planetary gravity inside?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rodolphoarruda 9y agoI thought "deep space" was intergalactic space, the really big void. But if the object came from within the Milky Way itself, it came from a rather busy place -- speaking in Universe terms.
- otempomores 9y agoIt looks like a battered ship
- AKifer 9y agoForget about going to Mars, making a probe riding these things will be much more interesting.
- flukus 9y agoI just recently read (well, listened to) Pushing Ice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice) which is along these lines. Fantastic story for anyone that likes hard sci fi, it starts off with a moon of saturn suddenly breaking out of orbit and the crew being sent on an intercept mission.
- PokemonNoGo 9y agoVery interesting! So all known "stuff floating around in our solarsystem" like Hale-Bopp et al have been deemed originating from here? Or have that conclusion just been taken for granted? Edit: Looked at the paper and saw this in the abstract: >None of the approximately 750,000 known asteroids and comets is thought to have originated outside our Solar System, but formation models suggest that orbital migration of the giant planets ejected a large fraction of the original planetesimals into interstellar space1. Very interesting that this has been the thought of affairs for objects in our solar system. I have never contemplated it and just assumed we must have been visited before by such objects.
- marcosscriven 9y agoIt’s apparently to do with the orbit - they identified this as extrasolar purely by the fact its orbit would be extremely unlikely to have arisen from our solar system’s protoplanetary disk.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gdubs 9y agoWish Carl Sagan were still alive.
- lawlessone 9y agoCould we ever use a net to stick a probe to one and get a free trip out of the solar system?
- colemannugent 9y agoI think that because it is moving so fast the net would have to be accelerated significantly so that it wouldn't just tear through the net. Plus there's the issue of actually getting into position in time to setup all the maneuvers required to match the speed.
- jasonmaydie 9y agoi'm surprised there aren't more things entering our solar system from deep space considering how large the universe is
- Mikho 9y agoThe first thought looking at the picture -- it could be interstellar probe created by some alien race. Rotation and metal body -- something to think about. This reminds me "The Dark Forest Theory" described in the fantastic trilogy "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu [1] -- Chinese Isaac Asimov. Really great read in case you didn't read it yet. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032/ https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...
- entitywang 9y agoIf all those sci-fi movies have thought me anything, that's a spacecraft masquerading as a rock. You can't fool all of us aliens!!!
- woodandsteel 9y agoIt was a test. If we had blown it out of the sky, then the aliens would know we are armed and dangerous, and they better stay away. But we didn't do that, and that means, well, let's just say things are going to get rather interesting.