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Second known interstellar visitor after Oumuamua
- QueensGambit 7y ago2I/Borisov, the second known interstellar visitor after Oumuamua, looks like a normal comet from our own Solar System. The size of the two objects, along with the rate of their discovery suggests this could be common occurrence - at any given moment about a dozen interstellar visitors are passing through the Solar System.
- aaron695 7y agoUnless someone wants to explain the maths I don't see why it would not be millions or billions or trillions of objects Intuitively the equations for gravity shouldn't matter on size, and I'd assume as you get smaller, objects become orders of magnitude more common. The number of objects getting flung out must be phenomenal, especially since I assume pretty much all would be getting flung into oblivion never to hit a gravity well. Unless these objects aren't interstellar, of course.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anjel 7y agoThey will be finding more of these, in large part because Oumuamua, "the news story" got huge ratings.
- zaphirplane 7y agoOr oumuamua is the long range scout and now the aliens are setting up their forward base ;) All hail our new overlords
- fernly 7y agoDoes this suggest a serious danger to any hypothetical interstellar ship? If the density of such kilometer-scale objects is such that disk of our solar system intercepts them by the dozen, there is one fuck of a lot more solid matter drifting through interstellar space than I have ever seen suggested. Sure, as Douglas Adams said, "Space is big. Really big," but still: if you imagine traveling even a very modest fraction of C, this begins to make the Millenium Falcon in the asteroid field[1] look like real science. [1] https://youtu.be/c8deRYotdng?t=133 https://youtu.be/c8deRYotdng?t=133
- richardw 7y agoMy first though was risk to Earth. Those things move fast and give you much less time to plan/build/launch.
- Baeocystin 7y agoI do wonder if, after enough of these are discovered, we can start making estimates of how much interstellar mass they represent compared to what we see in stars and their gravitationally-bound objects.
- newsbinator 7y agoIf these are pretty common and pass by within range, perhaps we can seed them with scanners and transmitters, and start building a weird observation/relay network.
- krisoft 7y agoWe can, but why would we? If you have a set of scanners/transmitters here on earth and want to attach it to one of these interstellar traveling rocks you need a rocket capable of matching their speed. These rockets are by definition also capable of leaving the solar system, otherwise they couldn’t match speed. So if all you care is a spreading observation/relay network, and not say the objects themselves then you are better off by just sending the scanners/transmitters out without complicated space balett and all the issues associated with it.
- newsbinator 7y agoOut of ignorance, I was guessing it takes a lot less fuel to put a payload in the path of an incoming interstellar traveling rock and let that get "crashed into" to embed on the surface. Although that's still complicated space ballet.
- dmurray 7y agoWe don't really have any "scanning and transmitting" technologies that can survive crashing at, say, 1km/s. You need at least 50 km/s of delta-v to catch the likes of 'Oumuamua, so if you could get within 1 km/s of its orbit you might as well spend the tiny extra bit to land gracefully.
- vages 7y agoBy alien (as in the article’s headline, do the authors limit their claim to “from another star”, or do they actually mean that some other intelligence constructed it?
- namarie 7y agoIt'd be much bigger news if it was constructed, I'd think.
- aetherspawn 7y agoHey if I were observing humans, all my ships would look and scan like comets.
- perl4ever 7y agoAs we see from New Horizons, a flyby gives you very limited options for scanning. But hanging around requires eliminating nearly all the velocity you had to get there, which is infeasible.
- mkl 7y agoNothing to do with intelligence at all. It's a comet, and a pretty ordinary one, not a spacecraft. What makes it alien is that it's not in orbit around the sun, it's just passing through.