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Judging by how humanity didn't see any of those for millennia and now three in just several years, I can propose two hypotheses: 1. Astronomers became good eno
by ordu 1y ago
Judging by how humanity didn't see any of those for millennia and now three in just several years, I can propose two hypotheses:
1. Astronomers became good enough to notice them
2. These rocks are first in an incoming flood of such objects, the Universe decided to destroy humanity.
- em3rgent0rdr 1y agohah! Yeah the title "Third Interstellar Object Discovered" needs to be changed to be more like "Third Discovery of an Interstellar Object"
- noduerme 1y agoI love this. But I can't help imagining the conversation on some remote South Pacific island going like this: "Third cargo chest discovered" "Maybe they've been sailing by here already for a long time and we just didn't notice."
- haiku2077 1y ago3. After we found the first one by chance we started looking for more objects outside the solar system's orbital plane
- eesmith 1y agoThis object is near the solar system's orbital plane - far closer than Halley's comet, for example. People have searched off the orbital plane for a long time, if only to find new comets. This object was found by ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. The project goal is to identify near-earth asteroids, evaluate the risk they might impact the Earth, and alert others if impact is predicted. The project started in 2015, two years before ʻOumuamua. It was not made specifically to find interstellar objects transiting the solar system.
- metalman 1y agoun-nervingly near the orbital plane, as the depiction shows the object passing just above, on approach, and juct below, on departure, of the orbital plane of mars given the low relative speed of these objects so far, we can define them as extra solar, something exra galactic could be moveing at fractional light speed relative to us and be almost impossible to see and track unless it was realy big and close, and as there are confirmed exra galactic stars, it is not conjecture to to then include rouge planets and asteriods ,etc in the list of signatures to be looking for, and perhaps dismissed from previous data as bieng equipment artifacts or noise.
- dotnet00 1y agoI get that you're joking, but I wonder if it could just be that we happen to be passing through some sort of interstellar debris cloud.
- tigerlily 1y agoGet ready for the, uh, Latter Day Late Heavy Bombardment!
- mr_toad 1y agoActually we’re in a surprisingly sparse area of the galaxy, a giant hole in the galaxy created by one (or more) supernova. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble
- stevedonovan 1y agoSo much for the old thermonuclear ramjet idea....
- kirykl 1y agoMaybe. The solar system was in this galactic position about 250 million years ago (one galactic year) and there was a major extinction event around that time
- DevelopingElk 1y agoIt's 1. A combination of better telescopes and GPU accelerated algorithms for picking out moving objects.
- 9dev 1y ago> These rocks are first in an incoming flood of such objects When ʻOumuamua flew past, we should have noticed it was a passive sensor drone. Now it is too late.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- shiroiuma 1y agoIt's not "the Universe"; it's an alien race that wants to destroy us before we become a threat to them.
- belter 1y agoWe are a much bigger threat to ourselves.
- phatskat 1y agoYep, the best thing for a race that is (rightfully) worried about our aggressiveness is to wait it out.
- lynx97 1y agoCame here to say that. Best to just wait and let history take its course.
- nandomrumber 1y agoOr launch an attack fleet, only to later, due to an error in a scaling factor, have the entire fleet unknowingly swallowed by a small dog.
- belter 1y agohttps://youtu.be/smwd8b0ycBg https://youtu.be/smwd8b0ycBg
- dguest 1y agoIt's more complicated than that. Benevolent aliens are planting incompetent people in positions of power so that we are perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation. But this is all to save us from the malevolent aliens who would obliterate us if they thought we had any chance of survival.
- eb0la 1y agoI believe #1 is true; but not #2. It's just that those rocks are more common than we thought. And we thought they were uncommon because we weren't able to spot them... yet.
- polytely 1y agoVera Rubin just came online, will will start to do surveys of the entire sky every 3 nights, which makes spotting stuff like this easier. https://youtu.be/X3N-DjVXh44 https://youtu.be/X3N-DjVXh44 so we are probably gonna notice a lot more of them
- TheBlight 1y agoWe don't know if they're all rocks or not yet.
- slightwinder 1y agoWe hadn't the means to discover them for most of the last millennia, so now being good enough is obvious. But the question is why now, and not 10 or 20 years ago. It might be that we had the ability for a longer time already, but it just never "clicked" until now to recognize them. It is also possible that we really just got good enough recently. Or even that until now, there really were none in the last decade we could find, and we are just lucky(?) that now more are coming our way. We might know this better in the next years, depending on whether there will now be an explosion of dozen and dozens of new interstellar objects discovered, or not. It might be another rush, like with exoplanets and local dwarf-planets.