First Extrasolar Object Observed Racing Through Our Solar System (space.com) 133
Enigma2175 writes: For the first time, scientists have observed an object they believe came from outside our solar system. The object is in a hyperbolic orbit that will send it back into interstellar space. From Space.com: "The object, known as A/2017 U1, was detected last week by researchers using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. 'It's long been theorized that such objects exist -- asteroids or comets moving around between the stars and occasionally passing through our solar system -- but this is the first such detection,' Chodas added. 'So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.' It's unclear what exactly this thing is. When A/2017 U1 was first spotted, it was thought to be a comet (and was therefore given the moniker C/2017 U1). But further observations have revealed no evidence of a coma -- the fuzzy cloud of gas and dust surrounding a comet's core -- so the object's name was amended to its current asteroidal designation."
Hollowed manned asteroid (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hollowed manned asteroid (Score:5, Funny)
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Or building on a sacred mountain pissed off the gods and they're throwing giant rocks at us to warn us not to do it again.
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Okay, but throwing and missing is so not god-ly
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A hallowed godded asteroid, then?
Rendezvous with Rama (Score:5, Funny)
Arthur C. Clarke was right again!
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Its a pretty slow space craft. I doubt it came from Vega.
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Recent calculations done by our scientists confirm that the meteor came from the Klendathu, the Bug planet. WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
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But did it have operational Bergenholms?
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It seems to have only a few km/s of residual velocity so its going to be hard to pin down its origin.
Re:Rendezvous with Rama (Score:5, Funny)
Its a pretty slow space craft. I doubt it came from Vega.
Slow is relative. It could be populated by a race of space sloths.
Que Randezvous with Rama (Score:5, Funny)
The object definitely deserves a more prosaic name. Like Rama... :-)
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Incorrect. For 'queue' or 'cue', either can be correct and only the speaker can say for sure which they wanted as grammatically both make sense. If he's got a list of things to do, saying "queue" is correct if he means 'add the rendezvous to the list of things needed to be done'. Now if he meant it's time to start the rendezvous, then yes, cue would be correct.
When dealing with ambiguity, it's usually best to give them the benefit of the doubt than assuming they meant what you think they meant.
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Shove your eggcorn up your R soul.
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He meant to write "queue," which isn't even the right word for the meaning he was trying to express. It should be "Cue."
Both are correct. Queue would mean it's the next item to discuss on a list; Cue meaning it's lined up to be discussed next. Either word can be used in that context.
Re: Que Randezvous with Rama (Score:1)
When I google "hard enough", I get results that I didn't want to see.
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"Rendezvous with Rama" [amazon.com] was a great book.
Greeting from the Outer Space at Halloween! (Score:1)
How appropriate!
Re:Greeting from the Outer Space at Halloween! (Score:5, Funny)
How appropriate!
Well, I sure hope that the UN Security Council is working feverishly on creating a stockpile of young virgins and candy . . .
. . . just in case the aliens stop by the Earth, ring our doorbell, and demand a "trick or treat" . . .
Re:Greeting from the Outer Space at Halloween! (Score:5, Funny)
That'll also be useful if Harvey Weinestein stops by
How to kickstart space exploration (Score:5, Funny)
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Please describe this "there" in space?
www.distancetomars.com
You'll find that space, unlike its depictions in movies and TV shows and books, is immensely empty with very little in it.
Also, please show evidence for this "requirement". Furthermore, what have the test pilots on the ISS "explored" over the decades? The inside of a tin can? The upper atmosphere?
Re:How to kickstart space exploration (Score:4, Funny)
That's an interesting idea. If you could covertly adjust the course of an asteroid as passed by Earth so that nobody knew why it changed, it would cause a huge reaction.
Any billionaires out there feel like trolling the entire human race?
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You seem to think "trolling the entire human race" involves making money. You may want to look up the definition of "trolling" sometime.
(Arnold J. Rimmer voice) (Score:5, Funny)
"ALIENS!"
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It’s a garbage pod!
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Actually, I was thinking more Giorgio Tsoukalos.
Is it slowing down? (Score:1)
Is it the size of Texas and is it slowing down? Because I think a movie predicted something like this would happen...
It's about the same (Score:3)
The size of the Continental U.S. in relation to Texas in relation to UK in relation to New Jersey is 3000:260:90:7. Wales is about the same size as New Jersey.
So yes, the size of Texas in relation to the U.S. (apart from Alaska) is about the size of Wales in relation to U.K..
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One Texas is 33.45 [wolframalpha.com] Wales.
PS, we have 50 other states (but Texas is the second largest)
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Even though this one is leaving the solar system already we're not out of the woods yet, "the Ramans do everything in threes."
Already on the way out. (Score:5, Informative)
It's already heading out of the solar system, so no need to worry about any malicious intent. TFA says that it passed perihelion around Sep. 9. It was closest to the Earth on Oct 14, at about 15 million miles (24 million km, sorry don't have it in LOC). It's heading toward the constellation Pegasus at over 97000 mph. Maybe we'll send them a warning in a few years?
It's a bit unsettling that we didn't notice this until it had passed the earth at a relatively close distance, and passed through the plane of the ecliptic twice. I know the chances of an impact are very low, but the late detection indicates that we may be missing an unknown number of events like this, and may not be correct about estimates of the chances of being hit by one.
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We know the chances of being hit by an object by looking at how many objects hit planets.
There are certainly a whole lot of these objects that we aren't seeing. We don't have near enough telescopes to scan the complete sky, much less be redundant in case one of the telescopes fails.
Its 97,000Kphhour, and ~52,000Mph.
--
"Meep Meep" - W. Cayote
Re:Already on the way out. (Score:4, Interesting)
>We know the chances of being hit by an object by looking at how many objects hit planets.
Also, to some degree, by common sense. Most of the dust spinning around our star that is going to collide with something has had five billion years to do so, and the clumps of matter formed in the process do a fairly good job of sweeping up the leftovers around the edges before they can get as close to the Sun as we are here on Earth.
I am not an astronomer, but I would anticipate that (given our star formed later than most) most of our neighbouring systems are in a similar state or even more orderly, so they wouldn't have much left in the way of significant rocks to lose to us in any gravitational tug-of-war.
And after that comes the fact that space is huge relative to the Solar System (making it unlikely any rogue rocks will come significantly within its gravity well), and the Solar System is huge relative to the Earth (making it unlikely any rogue rocks that actually venture into the Solar gravity well will also dip into Earth's). And the Earth itself is tiny so even something flying through our gravity well isn't particularly likely to impact our planet if it's travelling faster than Solar escape velocity (which it pretty much has to have been after falling into the Solar gravity well from outside it).
I gotta tell you... I am not particularly worried about my lack of insurance coverage in the event of loss due to extra-Solar impactor.
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>This would be a good thing to sell policies for, though
Why not? There's Rapture insurance to pay for sinners to care for your pets after God brings you home in the End of Times. (AfterTheRapturePetCare.com). I would hope that most of their sales are 'for the lulz' and a silly certificate, but I'd not be surprised to find they have sincere customers as well.
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Wouldn't that be the ideal time to sacrifice the pets to Satan or the FSM or something?
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Actually, it would be a pretty poor thing to sell policies for. Most asteroids aren't dinosaur-killers. They're 20-meter city-shattering rocks, and if one of them actually hits a city, the resulting payouts would bankrupt most insurance companies.
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It's a bit unsettling that we didn't notice this until it had passed the earth at a relatively close distance, and passed through the plane of the ecliptic twice. I know the chances of an impact are very low, but the late detection indicates that we may be missing an unknown number of events like this, and may not be correct about estimates of the chances of being hit by one.
It's the old story - you just don't know what you don't know. And any predictions have to be based on what we know.
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Its not about not knowing -- we're well aware that crap is hurtling through space and its just a matter of time before something comes our direction. Its happened many, many times in the past including some quite recently (that meteor in Russia a few years ago, for example.)
What its about is being able to detect. If you believe NASA and friends, we have a pretty good detection network for objects more than a few km in size (that is, big enough to cause serious, wide-spread damage if there was a direct imp
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Its not about not knowing -- we're well aware that crap is hurtling through space and its just a matter of time before something comes our direction.
Odd you got that from my post. I was replying to :
"It's a bit unsettling that we didn't notice this until it had passed the earth at a relatively close distance, and passed through the plane of the ecliptic twice. I know the chances of an impact are very low, but the late detection indicates that we may be missing an unknown number of events like this, and may not be correct about estimates of the chances of being hit by one.
We simply do not know where all of the objects that might hit us are. As this
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It's got a lot of energy to lose yet as it gets further from Sol. Hyperbolic excess speed is in the vicinity of 10-15 km/s, depending on which way it is heading (10 if it's still basically at the same radius from the Sun as Earth, 15 if it's basically headed straight out).
So it's going to be about six to ten times as long in transit as "97000 mph" suggests....
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Correction 4299 days (Score:2)
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Don't worry. If one hits us we'll definitely know about it.
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Don't worry. If one hits us we'll definitely know about it.
Depends on the size. If one hits us we may never know about it.
Re: Already on the way out. (Score:2)
It needs to report back, and wait for the reinforcements.
Re:Already on the way out. (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere, someone just deleted a voluminous bit of text, replaced it with "Mostly harmless.", and went on listening to Vogon poetry.
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parabolic orbits are VERY special. exactly as special as perfectly-circular ones. for a random object that hasn't fallen into an elliptical orbit around the sun, it's almost certainly hyperbolic.
(e.g. if it was exactly parabolic, we'd be right to suspect aliens...)
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Or we could conclude that it was so close to being exactly parabolic that our measurements weren't precise enough to determine which side of eccentricity 1 it falls on. This isn't that unusual (especially with older, less precise observations).
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Your suspicion should have consulted some actual data.
This is the most hyperbolic orbit ever observed. A parabola has eccentricity of 1 (exactly). In natural objects it really divides orbits into elliptical ones (less than 1) and hyperbolic ones (more than 1) though they could be so close to 1 that measurement error cannot distinguish them.
A/2017 U1 has an eccentricity of 1.1922 ± 0.00268.
This an eccentricity excess about four times larger than the next highest observation (comet C/1980 E1, with an ecc
It may contain some protomolecule. (Score:2)
It may contain some protomolecule.
Just over solar escape speed (Score:5, Informative)
Escape speed from 1 AU (Earth's orbital radius) is about 42 km/s. The speed of this object, stated as 156,400 km/h, is just over 43/km/h. Assuming the object is a bit more than 1 AU from the Sun right now, it will escape the solar system but not by a wide margin.
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Escape speed from 1 AU (Earth's orbital radius) is about 42 km/s. The speed of this object, stated as 156,400 km/h, is just over 43/km/h. Assuming the object is a bit more than 1 AU from the Sun right now, it will escape the solar system but not by a wide margin.
When you say "not by a wide margin", what do you mean? Because escape velocity means it'll end up infinitely far away, given infinite time, right?
Maybe you mean "not at a great speed?"
Re:Just over solar escape speed (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case, the margin I have in mind is in kinetic energy terms. It won't end up infinitely far away because it is nowhere near galactic escape velocity.
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Although I respect your attempt to back into the V_infinity figure for A/2017 U1 using only the information presented in a news article and guesses about the current distance, we have a GIGO situation here. You are way off.
The actual value of V_infinity (velocity excess after getting arbitrarily far from the Sun) is 26 km/sec [projectpluto.com], and astonishingly high number. This is a kinetic energy 2.6 times higher per unit mass than we have ever imparted to any object with rocket technology (and this New Horizons).
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Nice links, thank you!
shame we can't send probes (Score:2)
This is the kind of event the space program ought to be better prepared for.
Even if this particular object may be be unreachable with current technology, we should have robotic probes that can approach and even crash into/land on objects that appear unexpectedly.
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That.. is a good number of decades away. We've only barely touched probes on a couple of comets within the solar system where we have a firm grasp of their location and how to get there. Trying to send a probe to an extra-solar object like this, especially with little or no warning, would be fairly ambitious to say the least.
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NASA won't be able to do it in less than a few decades because it is an inefficient, lumbering behemoth. But the technology exists, and if there was some market incentive, we could do it cheaply.
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If you're waiting for market incentive, it'll be possibly centuries. There's just not much economic incentive to invest in space exploration. We only got to America because some guy with big dreams convinced a queen that he'd find a faster route to India. We only got to the moon in order to beat the Russians. We're only going to see Mars because one really smart guy with big dreams happened into enough money to fulfill those dreams, without any real guarantee of payback.
Historically speaking, major expl
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I know deGrasse Tyson has been pushing that idea, but he doesn't know what he is talking about. Columbus' voyage was overwhelmingly a privately financed and insured business venture with an expectation of profit. It was risky, but no riskier than modern startups.
The market incentives are there: massive amounts of metals and other
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If we could have detected it on or before its perihelion (2 Sept), that would have given us just over a month. If there were a vehicle more or less ready (less fueling), we might have been able to get the probe in position for perigee: 15 million miles in, say, 30 days is an average speed of 500k miles/ day, or a bit over 20k miles/ hour relative to Earth. (That's a straight line distance, while obviously our probe would not be going in a straight line, so it would need to be faster than that.) The relat
BUGS! (Score:5, Funny)
The Bugs send another meteor our way !
But this time we are ready !
Planetary defenses are better than ever !
Would you like to know more ?
Perhaps that was just a warning shot (Score:2)
Seriously? Are you kidding? (Score:2)
The "first" except for pretty much every single hyperbolic comet ever observed, right? The first as in not at all the first. The first in a meaning of the word first that does not, in fact, mean first.
The whole point of "hyperbolic orbit" is that it is an object that isn't bound to the sun, and objects that are not bound to the sun are by definition extrasolar. Yes, any given hyperbolic comet might have come out of the Oort cloud or some such from a previously bound orbit, but since we cannot tell what t
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Sure, objects have been observed with hyperbolic orbits before. But I believe all of them have been shown to be comets and all had significant evidence that they had received a gravity boost from one of the planets kicking their orbits up JUST enough to exit the solar system. This one is not a comet, is way out of the plane of the planets (unlikely it has received any gravity boosts) and at least initial observations suggest it has more than enough energy to leave the solar system. So it is highly likely
First "ever" extrasolar object observed??? (Score:3)
Wow, I had no idea that extrasolar object were so rare. I thought it was pretty common.
Usually, by looking at the trajectory of every asteroid you can easily simulate it's origin. Of course, that trajectory can be pushed by an external force (impact with another object, friction from gaz etc.) but, as far as I know, it's pretty rare. I'm also guessing that the trajectory of pretty much every object observed (asteroid/comet) so far have been simulated. And since it seem we observed over 500k asteroid so far (quick google search), it mean that extrasolar object are indeed very, very rare.
It's striking that our whole galaxy, with so many star and light in the night star, is, in reality, so empty.
Depends how you define "extrasolar object" (Score:2)
Wow, I had no idea that extrasolar object were so rare. I thought it was pretty common.
Since "extrasolar" means outside the solar system every star, except the sun, we see is an "extrasolar object" and even if you exclude stars for some reason the exoplanets observed would still count. Then there are all the cosmic rays which are extrasolar objects too. So what you can say is that it is the first non-subatomic, extrasolar object observed in the solar system.
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"I thought it was pretty common."
They probably are, but are for the most part so fast, small and unpredictable that they probably slip through the solar system without us noticing. The Pan-STARRS telescopes are some of the few large dedicated asteroid discovery/tracking telescopes on the planet and they focus mostly on likely NEO orbits and are only setup to discover decently sized objects. Maybe if we spent as much money on telescopes as we do on pool chemicals (around $5 Billion) we'd see a few more of them, along with, I don't know, cataloging all of the city/region killer asteroids out there.
I'm pretty sure the sample of "big" asteroid are a good representation of asteroid of all size. So if indeed 1/+500k of the asteroid discovered so far are extrasolar, I don't see how it would be any different for the smaller asteroid not detected by Pan-STARRS and other telescope.
Unless I'm missing something?
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Extrasolar objects usually have trajectories and are in locations in the sky where we don't scan for them.
I guess the really interesting question is... (Score:2)
I guess the really interesting question is whether it's going to head out on the same vector it came in on, in which case it's most likely a flyby... everything else being really improbably likely to go out the way it came in.
I vote aliens.
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Maybe they're just coming back to pick her up after her failed mission to destroy the Earth. :)
What do you mean "failed"? She personally managed to get Donald Trump installed as the President of the United States of America.
I'd say that her mission to destroy the Earth is right on track.
And what's more, she is very humble and does not claim all the credit for herself, and is very thorough in citing the contributions of others who helped her get Trump elected so that he can destroy the Earth. Groups of people like white males, white females who think like white males, women of color who think like
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The Orange Orangutan is doing so much better! (Score:1, Offtopic)
He's Winning!
lol.
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If they would take every politician and drop them into the Sun, I would give them a lot of leeway on the rest of their invasion plans.
Re:Penoid (Score:5, Informative)
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If I were an Alien in charge of designing a close reconnaissance of Earth, I could not have planned a better trajectory than this.
Perhaps A/2017 U1's mothership will rendezvous just outside the oort cloud.
Re: Penoid (Score:5, Funny)
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It got close enough that earths gravity had a noticeable effect on its trajectory surprised no one else has picked up on this
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Perhaps they didn't notice because Earth didn't have much of an effect. 15 million miles is a long ways.
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Not much of a beeline. 15 million miles is nearly as far away as Venus at its closest (24 million miles). If it had been much further away, we probably wouldn't have detected it--which is another way of saying that there could be lots (like dozens) of these that pass through our solar system, and we only see the ones that seem to be coming relatively close.
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It's already speeding past Uranus!
I'm glad it didn't penetrate it.
Re:military intervention: TOO LATE! (Score:1)
There's no possibility of launching anything that could catch up to it now.
Maybe the aliens will come back, but if they do, it will probably only be their Intergalactic Pest Control Team coming to rid the planet of psychotic human infestations before they can spread to the rest of the universe...
Besides, Earth will make a pretty good vacation spot, once it's pet problem is corrected.