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Another Interstellar Object Detected in the Solar System
- bloopernova 7y ago...wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes...
- gpderetta 7y agoOpened the thread looking for this comment :)
- Mobius01 7y agoThis always comes to mind when an event like this is announced. Paging Captain Norton.
- DoctorOetker 7y agowho are the Ramans? are you suggesting these are callibration shots?
- rob74 7y agoLMGTFY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama :D
- teh_klev 7y ago> LMGTFY Even with a smiley face this is still a tiresome and rude response.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bloopernova 7y agoIn the book by Arthur C Clarke Rendezvous with Rama the eponymous Ramans designed their interstellar craft with triple redundancy. Everything is built in threes - 3 airlocks, for example. The line I quoted is the very last line in the book, and is equal parts fascinating and chilling, a very apt end for a great book. I highly recommend you read it. If you are in the USA and have a library card, may I suggest the Libby app for Android and iPhone? Or of course buying it second hand from online bookstores is also an option: looks like a new paperback is about $4.55 at smile.amazon.com, used is about 1 to 3 dollars, Kindle version is $7.59. I don't recommend the other books in the series, they don't live up to the original, in my opinion. A similar book is Eon by Greg Bear, although less pure sci-fi exploration and more sci-fi adventure.
- krapp 7y ago>The Ramans do everything in threes... Ironically, Arthur C. Clarke never intended for Rendezvous With Rama to be the start of a trilogy when he wrote that, even though it's an obvious trilogy hook in hindsight. It never occurred to him until readers kept asking when the other two books were coming out.
- makerofspoons 7y agoI'm excited that as our technology improves we will likely find objects like this increasingly frequently, and in the near future may have the ability to rapidly send a mission to intercept one.
- dogma1138 7y agoIt’s also because I think we are more actively looking for them now since we discovered one kinda by accident. Overall I think we’ll discover that they are more common than we think which makes me wonder if we could use them to piggy back probes on them to the outer solar system and beyond since they move quite darn fast.
- projektfu 7y agoA probe would have to crash pretty hard into one to easily absorb that much kinetic energy, I imagine, otherwise it's the same old problem of delta-V.
- dogma1138 7y agoI think we might be able to design something that would be able to absorb most of the energy as well as possibly decelerate the probe impact like an explosive charge that won’t work that well as an impulse engine in vacuum but would work against an object. Some of these objects are also not very dense so some ablative enclosure might also work.
- sbierwagen 7y ago30 kilometers per second is 67,108 miles per hour. That's a lot of probe impact energy to absorb.
- tomrod 7y agoSomething like a Newton's cradle with different radii? One to deform on impact, another to take a sizable portion of the force?
- davidcuddeback 7y agoUpdate: eccentricity closer to 3.0 (still hyperbolic). https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171845027099795456 https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171845027099795456
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fasteddie31003 7y agoOr the object is speeding up...
- davidcuddeback 7y agoThe orbit didn't physically change. The author fixed his code and reran the analysis.
- jlmorton 7y agoShort Wiki article on the object: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2019_Q4_(Borisov) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2019_Q4_(Borisov)
- jedberg 7y agoI see a lot of cool space stuff in the tweet and in these comments. Can someone explain this to someone without an astrophysics background? What does the eccentricity of 3 mean, why is that important, and why is this discovery important? Thanks!
- throwaway2048 7y agoEccentricity is a measure of how elongated/oval shaped your orbit is, eccentricity of 0 means a circular orbit, 0.5 is "very elongated orbit" (that is coming relatively close to the sun, then going very far away, think deep space comets) 1 means a parabola escape trajectory, and anything higher than 1 means a very fast escape trajectory. The fact its eccentricity is 3 means its going through the solar system extremely fast (relative to the orbits of other things at comparable distance), and is going to exit again after slingshotting around the sun, that means its origin is extremely likely to be extra-solar because we know of no real mechanism for a body to generate such extreme speed while originating from within the solar system. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Kepler_orbits.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Kepler_o... In this image, red has an eccentricity of 0.7, green 1.0 and blue 1.7, the sun would be the focus. The the green and blue "orbits" never return, just like a parabola/hyperbola never curve into an ellipse, think of a graph like y=x^2.
- davidcuddeback 7y agoEccentricity describes the shape of an orbit. 0 is perfectly circular. Between 0 and 1 is elliptical. 1 is parabolic. Above 1 is hyperbolic. So an eccentricity of 3.0 is hyperbolic, which means the object is of interstellar origin. (Picture the shape of a hyperbola in your mind. An object on that trajectory can't come back to the same point.) With the uncertainties that come from fitting early observations, these numbers can change as more observations come in. At 1.07, it would still be possible that the final orbit turns out to not be hyperbolic. At 3.0, that's much less likely. What makes this discovery exciting is that it would be the second object of interstellar origin that we've discovered in our own solar system (and both discoveries are fairly recent). That's a new class of object to be studied and presents an opportunity to learn something new. The fact that these two discoveries are temporally close suggests that we'll discover many more as our technology and technique improve.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- petschge 7y agoSee also the initial professional report at http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=13100 http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=13100
- m3kw9 7y agoSadly, there has to be lots more that are undetected
- CalChris 7y agoJust as a reminder, circle e = 0 earth e = 0.0167 ellipse e < 1 parabola e = 1 hyperbola e > 1 So at e = 3, this object is in a sense bouncing off the sun at an angle of 180 * 2 * invsec(3) / pi or ~141 degrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(mathematics)
- SiempreViernes 7y agoAn animation of the orbit as it is known right now: https://twitter.com/tony873004/status/1171917219485192192 https://twitter.com/tony873004/status/1171917219485192192
- healsjnr1 7y agoThis animation seems to imply it is traveling orthogonal to the ecliptic. Is that normal (maybe expected is a better word) for this kind of thing?
- teraflop 7y agoThat's a trick of perspective. The estimated orbital elements [1] show an inclination of roughly 45 degrees between the object and the ecliptic. If you click the link in the tweet, you can rotate the model and see for yourself. The orbital plane of the solar system is not aligned in any special orientation relative to nearby stars or the Milky Way, so we would expect interstellar objects to arrive from all directions with equal probability. [1]: https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171845027099795456 https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171845027099795456
- healsjnr1 7y agoThanks, I was wondering if there was a perspective thing going on. But also thinking that the larger the angle to the ecliptic, the less likely it was something that just happened to be in a very large orbit around our solar system. From the discussion above though it sounds like the eccentricity tells us that anyway.
- booleandilemma 7y agoCan we not miss this one this time? I’m still bummed over not catching sight of the first interstellar solar sail.
- RandomBacon 7y agoApparently it will come within 1.7 AU of Mars and 1.9 AU of Earth. I'm not sure if they've figured out how big it is, or what other analysis they can do of it. Eye-balling the animation someone else link to, it looks like it will be in our solar system area for about half a year. I have no idea if we have telescopes good enough for this. Does anyone else know?
- HarryHirsch 7y agoESA is planning to launch the Comet Interceptor mission in 2028: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Interceptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Interceptor Hope a rewarding target comes up.
- gfodor 7y agofrankly, having read the three body trilogy, these kinds of reports scare the pants off of me. i always put a small prior that astronomers would look at this and say "uh, oddly, it seems to be headed precisely for a direct collision with Earth."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- humble_engineer 7y agoMaybe its just waiting for us to destroy ourselves and then come and make a new home out of our radiated shell of a planet like a hermit crab.
- katharinaa 7y agoSo interesting. There is so much that we don't know about the solar system. Does anyone have more helpful links on this topic?
- chadcmulligan 7y agoSomething I don't understand - why is it surprising that there could be rocks floating around that come from other solar systems?
- freehunter 7y agoI don't think it necessarily has to be surprising to be interesting. If it came from another solar system, it's traveled more than 4 light years (obviously much slower than light speed) to get here. That's a long time, and our solar system is a very small target, so the odds are (literally) astronomical. There's a lot we don't know about the space between solar systems or the space outside of our own heliosphere. This is evidenced by our lack of understanding of when (or if) Voyager actually left our solar system. We just don't know enough to say. Having the opportunity to see something that came from outside our solar system is a good thing for science.
- chadcmulligan 7y agooh ok, thanks
- samtheprogram 7y agoI was under the impression we did know that Voyager left our solar system -- could you clarify what you mean by this to someone not familiar with these concepts? https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/science/in-a-breathtaking-first-nasa-craft-exits-the-solar-system.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/science/in-a-breathtaking...
- hannasanarion 7y agoFor several years there were a series of "voyager left the solar system today" headlines, each using a different definition of the solar system boundary because very little is known about where it is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
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- japaget 7y agoSee also the Minor Planet Electronic Circular at https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K19/K19RA6.html https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K19/K19RA6.html
- mirimir 7y agoInteresting. This came in at ~30 km/sec. And Oumuamua came in at ~26 km/sec. It seems that "the Sun moves through the Milky Way at about 20 km/s faster than the local average", or "local standard of rest (LSR)".[0] With the components being ... 11.1 km/s toward the galactic center 12.24 km/s extra in the direction of galactic rotation 7.25 km/s toward the north galactic pole Some ~nearby stars are coming through the galactic plane at 150 km/sec or so relative to LSR. These objects probably came from stars with relatively low velocities relative to LSR. There might be some moving a lot faster, but the detection window would be much smaller. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_kinematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_kinematics
- cbwillett82 7y agoAll I need to know is are we Gona die ?
- gbugniot 7y agoIt's a comet. https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171894551780290560 https://twitter.com/AscendingNode/status/1171894551780290560
- dgudkov 7y agoA helpful comment from the twitter thread: "Not aliens. And surely they're common. But we just haven't been able to detect these things until recently. It's new to us, not new to the universe." [1] https://twitter.com/twit_spires/status/1171939194282762240 https://twitter.com/twit_spires/status/1171939194282762240
- mellosouls 7y agoAn interesting podcast interviewing Avi Loeb at the time on his speculative theory from the previous visitor: https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/040 https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/040
- sidcool 7y agoIs it even feasible to think of scraping something off this object for study? I mean in far future it will happen, but does current tech allow it?