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How likely is it that a random object from outside the solar system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
by baggy_trough 1y ago
How likely is it that a random object from outside the solar system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
- grues-dinner 1y agoHow likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
- baggy_trough 1y agoPretty likely if there are a lot of them!
- grues-dinner 1y agoThen I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!). Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
- 827a 1y agoIn fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its name.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThe other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)
- ceejayoz 1y agoShuffle a deck of cards, and statistically no one has ever shuffled the same sequence in all of human history. It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards. Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThat's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hammering in all the time, not that the first ones you see are particularly special, even if one of them seems to be making a statistically unlikely near approach to Mars.
- ceejayoz 1y agoYeah, like exoplanets. When I was in middle school there were none. Now there’s 6,000 confirmed ones.
- onion2k 1y agoSurely no one was actually thinking there weren't exoplanets though. We didn't need experimental proof that they exist to be reasonably sure that they do.
- dhosek 1y agoThe existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians are pretty sure it is, but they don’t know for sure.
- baggy_trough 1y agoI’m curious how unlikely it is. Seems very, very unlikely to pass by 2 major planets.
- mytailorisrich 1y agoAliens have been doing this every few years for 250,000 years but we've just only managed to build barely decent telescopes ;)
- downrightmike 1y agoI wonder if we are going through a debris cloud and these are just the first small objects.
- rkomorn 1y agoI find this to be an interesting thought.
- downrightmike 1y agoEarth is currently traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of gas, dust, and plasma, and a recent study suggests that the solar system may have recently passed through a dense cloud of supernova debris. Evidence for this supernova event includes the presence of the radioactive isotope iron-60.
- codr7 1y agoThis one is anything but small.
- simonh 1y agoWe have only recently been able to detect them at scale, so we should not confuse first ones detected with first ones to arrive in the solar system. It’s just as likely they are the tail end of a debris cloud, but our detection tech wasn’t up to spotting all the previous ones.
- pedalpete 1y agoI may be super naive here, but are we really defining "close" or is it that the object is close enough that it makes sense to point our objects that are close to Jupiter at the new object? It is passing between two point in our night sky. I believe from a plane view, if you look at our universe from the perspective of it laying flat, it is my understanding the spin of our universe means that everything ends up within a flat plane, so in a 3 dimensional space, we have a limited Y axis. The other planets are spaced out across the X and Y axis, this is passing between or across two points. Am I thinking of this right? I know very little about astronomy.
- antonvs 1y agoThere’s no evidence that the universe is spinning. The observable universe is not a flat plane - we see galaxies in all directions and at all distances. You may be thinking of our galaxy (the Milky Way) or even our solar system, which both rotate and as such are both somewhat flattened (the solar system much more so than the galaxy.) But what’s happening here has little to do with that. If you imagine the closest distance that Earth gets to Mars as a yardstick, 3I/Atlas is about half that yardstick’s distance from Mars right now - much closer than Earth ever gets. It’s practically in Mars’ back yard.
- pedalpete 1y agoThanks for clarifying that. And you're right, I was referring to our solar system, not the universe. It's in Mars' backyard, but was it, or will it also be in Jupiter's backyard? I couldn't understand that from the original post. It seemed to me that it was just that our telescopes/cameras near Jupiter would be pointed in that direction.
- lrasinen 1y agoIt's Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) and it's not yet anywhere near Jupiter. Its trajectory has a few slingshot loops around Venus and Earth, and it's just coming off the Venus encounter. It's about 0.43 AU from the comet at its nearest, whereas Earth will be pretty much on the opposite side of the Sun, making observations difficult from here. Edit: Earth, Mars and Jupiter are in roughly 120 degrees from each other as seen from the Sun, with the Earth-Sun-Jupiter angle closing up fast and the E-S-M angle growing slightly slower. In about two months the E-S-M angle will be 180.
- lazide 1y agoAny object not doing so is very unlikely to be seen by us.
- baggy_trough 1y agoWhy so?
- lazide 1y agoThere is a lot of darkness, and we can only look in so many places. We tend to look along the plane of our elliptic because that is where everything in our solar system is. Looking elsewhere is possible, but increasingly lonely/low odds.
- baggy_trough 1y agoI don’t know if that applies to the sky surveys.
- lazide 1y ago1) they are new 2) they are still limited in coverage area (https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/FinderChart/docs/coverage.html https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/FinderChart/docs/...)
- ph4rsikal 1y agozero. It must be the Borg after the time jump.