2 ms·
Seems highly unlikely these crazy 'from outside the solar system' ideas are likely. This meme spreads well, but that to me means there is far more chance it is
by btilly 7y ago
Seems highly unlikely these crazy 'from outside the solar system' ideas are likely.
This meme spreads well, but that to me means there is far more chance it is not true. The fact no one questions it also seems suspicious.
This left about 24 km/s faster than anything can go and remain inside of the Solar System. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to get something going that fast?
A baseball going that fast has about 42 megajoules of kinetic energy. A semi on the interstate has about half a megajoule of kinetic energy. This thing was at least 100 meters long and all of it was going that fast.
For the record we do not have the technology to fire a rocket that fast. We only managed to get rockets to leave the Solar System by loading them up with gravity assists from planets. And even so they didn't get to that speed. If two asteroids have a head on collision, the pieces won't move that fast. (And it would have to be a heck of a collision to make a piece that big.)
If this came from inside of the Solar System, WTF accelerated it, how did it do so without breaking the object into smithereens, and why didn't we see evidence of the event that caused it?
By contrast this was going just about the average speed of interstellar objects in our neighborhood. (The Sun happens to be just passing through the ecliptic, and spends most of its time well above or below the Milky Way. Therefore to us, everything in our neighborhood is moving fast.) Any junk hanging around would have a trajectory that looks like this one. Now obviously space is pretty empty. Which is why it is so impressive that we actually spotted something from space.
Yes. It is highly unlikely that anything we see in the Solar System didn't come from here. But it is effectively impossible for anything starting in the outer reaches of the Solar System to get to this speed. And extremely likely that an interstellar object would go about this fast. Therefore it probably is an interstellar object.