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One of my (highly educated and successful) buddies thinks it some sort of alien interstellar probe. I told my 13 year, who keeps up with these kinds of things,
by chasd00 1y ago
One of my (highly educated and successful) buddies thinks it some sort of alien interstellar probe. I told my 13 year, who keeps up with these kinds of things, and asked what he thinks. He just kind of stared at me and then said "i think it's a comet from outside the solar system." and went back to playing DCS. heh from the mouth of babes..
- baggy_trough 1y agoClearly your son has not studied its orbital path near 2 major planets.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWhat in said path would you like to highlight? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_and_Jupiter_missions_observe_comet_3I-ATLAS_ESA512908.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS#Trajectory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS#Trajectory
- baggy_trough 1y agoIt goes very close to 2 major planets. What's the chance of that?
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt was only detected when 4.5 AUs from the Sun (which, I'll also note, exerts significant graviational force on inbound objects). It was already close; we can't currently detect the tens/hundreds/thousands of similar objects likely whizzing past at further distances as we speak. If it was 100 AUs at closest approach, we would never have seen it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud is still theoretical, even) The chances of yesterday's Powerball numbers being 04 24 49 60 65 01 was about 1:300M.
- baggy_trough 1y agoI don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Look at how close it goes to Mars and Jupiter.
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Look at how close it goes to Mars and Jupiter. You're doing the thing. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.sv... It's close because we saw it. We saw it because it's close.
- baggy_trough 1y agoWe are not on Mars or Jupiter.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWe are (via our robot representatives). In fact, they're our closest vantage points to this thing. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_s_ExoMars_and_Mars_Express_observe_comet_3I_ATLAS https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_s_... This thing traveled light years to get here. Possibly over billions of years. 30 million kilometers from Mars and 300 million and 3 billion kilometers from Mars would all be close approaches. Any approach can be claimed to be close; that's the magic trick at play here.
- baggy_trough 1y agoOur robot representatives there were not the ones who spotted it, so what relevance is it that they are there? I don't think you're responding to my claim, which is that the close passes to Mars and Jupiter seem very unlikely. Of all random trajectories through the solar system at the distance of this body, what fraction of them pass equally close to major planets? I'd even be willing to limit it to trajectories close to the ecliptic plane, because we may be scanning that plane more.
- withinboredom 1y agoSomeone really aught to add a picture at the bottom of this article with a gif of aliens saying "take me to your leader"...