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Space

A New 'Interstellar Visitor' Has Entered the Solar System (livescience.com) 67

Astronomers have detected a mysterious "interstellar object," dubbed A11pl3Z, speeding through the solar system at 152,000 mph. If confirmed, it would be just the third known interstellar visitor, following 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The visiting space object will pass near Mars and the Sun later this year before leaving the solar system forever. Live Science reports: The newly discovered object, currently dubbed A11pl3Z, was first spotted in data collected between June 25 and June 29 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which automatically scans the night sky using telescopes in Hawaii and South Africa. The mystery object was confirmed by both NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies and the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on Tuesday (July 1), according to EarthSky.org.

A11pl3Z is most likely a large asteroid, or maybe a comet, potentially spanning up to 12 miles (20 kilometers). It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h) and is approaching us from the part of the night sky where the bar of the Milky Way is located. Based on A11pl3Z's speed and trajectory, experts think it originated from beyond the sun's gravitational influence and has enough momentum to shoot straight through our cosmic neighborhood without slowing down. However, more observations are needed to tell for sure.

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A New 'Interstellar Visitor' Has Entered the Solar System

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  • by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @03:27AM (#65493160)
    ...that Avi Loeb is going to claim it's aliens?
    • My sources say yes.
    • Probably depends on its characteristics.

      He had quite an amusing series of papers popping the bubbles of all the 'debunkers'.

      He never proved what it was but he sure proved many things that it wasn't, as claimed by ThE eXpErTs.

      Midwit scientists abhor an unknown and run to bad ideas like a safety blanket.

      FWIW his grad student at the time had the better ideas, involving relative motion of solar systems within the Galactic Plane. His models were the best fit for the available data.

      • by Sique ( 173459 )
        He still can't prove his claims. No need to debunk him. And just because he was able to point out errors in some of the papers that tried to correct him, he wasn't proven right in any way. Errare humanum est, and you can be wrong in so many ways that most of them contradict each other. This does not make any of them more right than the others.
  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @03:33AM (#65493162)

    I don't like it. They leach off our gravity.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:06AM (#65493192) Journal

      I don't like it. They leach off our gravity.

      "These freeloader comets need to be deported back to their home star! This is Sparta! I mean Solar System! Other stars are not sending their best comets; these comets have mental, have virus, catastrophe our grammar, flatten dogs and cats, and nobody wants them! If you think the Dino's had it bad! At least Dino's gave us gasoline, God's Liquid Gold [sniff].

      They are poisoning the ions and isotopic ratios of our system, damaging our prosperous pro-Solar culture! Even Jupiter wants to leave now! We cannot even tell the gender of these degenerate lumps, so sad. I and I alone have the power and means to stop this horrendous invasion of these unwanted shit-hole clumps of useless dust and smelly gas. Make the Solar System Great Again! [claps]

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        I don't like it. They leach off our gravity.

        "These freeloader comets need to be deported back to their home star!

        No comet is illegal! Make Earth a Sanctuary planet. Life was made possible by comets.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:26AM (#65493208)

      Can't we just deport it to the Mars and let it leech of that gravity instead! Damn foreigners coming and stealing our valuable fundamental forces!

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      Just wait 'til they find out it's actually a capsule carrying an army of borg drones and nanonites to prep sector 001 for assimilation.

    • by BrentH ( 1154987 )
      We should be a great wall. And make them pay for it.
  • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @03:41AM (#65493166) Homepage Journal

    ICE must spare no expense capturing this illegal alien and sending it to El Salvador!

  • Rama (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bomek ( 63323 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:50AM (#65493230) Homepage

    Finally the rendezvous with Rama

    • Does sound like the plot. Aren't they making that into a movie soon?
      • Re:Rama (Score:5, Informative)

        by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @09:34AM (#65493538)

        Yeah the Rama movie has been in production hell for decades now but recently Denis Villeneuve got attached to direct after he's done with Dune 3 and/or James Bond or the other 3 projects he's got lined up so I still give it a 50/50 shot it gets made still.

        I imagine whoever owns the rights doesn't want to sell them or I'd imagine it would be a prestige-TV series by now but I'd be happy to see his version of the story.

        https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        If it does get made into a movie finally I don't have very high hopes. The entire story revolves around nothing but the thrill of exploration and mystery behind Rama which is left unknown in the book. Fantastic story, fantastic read. A product of the time. Not sure it would make a popular movie though. No doubt they'd have to add pointless interpersonal conflict like they did in the later Rama books, which weren't nearly as good. Also as the explanation behind Rama was revealed in the books, it was kind

    • This would probably be Rama II.
  • ... but then everything is relative and our solar system is moving at quite a lick. Could it be that we're the ones moving fast past it and this asteroid is more or less just hanging around minding its own business (so to speak)?

    • by rossdee ( 243626 )

      What is the speed of the solar system (relative to the center of the galaxy) ?

      • by yo303 ( 558777 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @08:14AM (#65493426)

        What do you mean? An African or European solar system?

      • The sun is hurtling around the solar system at ~230 kps (relative to the local standard rest frame), but so is the asteroid.

        Since both objects can be considered to be orbiting the milky way at the same speed, we generally consider that speed to be zero for the purposes of comparison, and only compare the two objects motion relative to each other.

      • About 220 km/s. (One of those numbers I just know, because it happens to come up frequently in my line of work, which is trying to detect dark matter signatures.) Too lazy to translate into stupid units.
    • Actually one of my problems with the article is that it completely fails to mention what the quoted speed is relative to. I'm guessing it is relative to the sun and not the Earth but since the Earth's orbital velocity is almost 30 km/s (well over 100,000 km/h) relative to the Sun it actually makes a significant difference whether the speed is relative to Earth or the Sun.
      • Occasionally ephemerides are calculated in geocentric coordinates - Earth-centred ones - but normally that's kept for Earth-orbiting objects and (potential) impactors. (I was reading up on this last night, and the author of one of the tools for converting observations (two angles, a time, and a brightness) commented that he'd only rarely came across a body that needed selenographic coordinates (Moon-centred), and and they'd all been artificial satellites, never a natural body.)

        Generally the calculations are

      • The quoted article says “ It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h)”. The article linked from the top of that article says “ The object is traveling toward the sun extremely fast, at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h).” I think it is pretty clear what the speed is relative to. Regardless, determination of whether an object is interstellar requires its orbital elements relative to sun, and knowledge of its specific orbital energy or eccentricity
    • It's coming from the direction of Sagittarius, so it's moving across the path of the Solar System as we travel around the Milky Way. It's basically T-boning us.
    • 1I/`Oumuamua was at approximately "local rest" with respect to the stars in the Sun's vicinity, and we sort-of "ran into it". (The Sun and the Solar system has a significant velocity to most of the nearby stars ; you need to cast the net wider - a few hundred light years - to get a meaningful average. Corollary : the nearest star to the Solar system has changed in the last few myriads of years (10,000 yrs) and will do again repeatedly in the future.)

      3I/ATLAS (named for the telescope/ computer system that de

  • "The visiting space object will pass near Mars and the Sun later this year before leaving the solar system forever." Only that it suddenly stops without any deceleration and starts harvesting biomass from our system. Prepare to get harvested!!1
    • "The visiting space object will pass near Mars and the Sun later this year before leaving the solar system forever." Only that it suddenly stops without any deceleration and starts harvesting biomass from our system. Prepare to get harvested!!1

      Please. If we're gonna go out, may as well go out in an interesting way.

  • by mick232 ( 1610795 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @07:19AM (#65493376)
    for sure.
    • I thought it was called 3I/ATLAS or C/2025 N1.

      • It was assigned that name (for the telescope/ sensor/ computer system that found it) yesterday afternoon - sorry, the day before yesterday, now ; just after midnight, UT. In the same way that 2I is "Borisov" (the discoverer), and throwing 1I/`Oumuamua into contrast whose discoverers chose to give it a different name. Normal service has been resumed on the "interstellar object naming" front.

        The discovery system has a name which is an acronym, and in their hundreds (thousands) of other discoveries they've ma

    • What's wrong with "All Please"?
    • Sorry, but “for sure” is really dumb name. Anyone got a better one?
  • Bypass (Score:3, Funny)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @08:08AM (#65493416)
    Traffic should increase nicely once the Earth is demolished and the intergalactic bypass is completed.
  • I know that a decade or so ago we did not have the ability to detect and monitor all objects capable of destroying life on Earth yet. Do we now have that ability? Are we now identifying and tracking every potential candidate of that kind, or is that even possible?

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      No, we aren't tracking EVERY object of that kind. (You didn't say all, so that includes the meteor that hits a gopher in his hole.)

      Possible? Yeah, I think it's possible. It would be a bit expensive. We're tracking most large objects that cross Earth's orbit. New ones don't appear very often, and we rarely lose track of any. It would take multiple observatories in places outside the plane of the solar system to track all of them, so we've been surprised occasionally by "city killer" meteors, though non

  • What's Randy Quaid been up to lately? For a few years there he was making good progress transforming into a real-life Russell Casse.
  • "The visiting space object will pass near Mars and the Sun later this year before leaving the solar system forever."

    That's what they want you to believe but I think we all know it's here to blow up the Earth.

  • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @09:09AM (#65493500)

    ...and is approaching us from the part of the night sky where the bar of the Milky Way is located.

    When did the Milky Way get a bar, and why haven't we been invited to it yet?

  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @10:46AM (#65493714)
    This makes me think how different solar systems have almost nothing to do with each other. If all the other solar systems (that is, 99.9999999% of the universe) disappeared tomorrow, would it have any affect on us whatsoever?
    • by dryeo ( 100693 )

      Might come up with a new religion as the stars slowly vanished, though most of them are far enough away that we wouldn't notice they are gone for a long time.

  • They're throwing shit at us because they're bored and their AI is so inbred after several generations of consuming its ancestors' slop that it hallucinates frequently and so the asteroids miss Earth.

  • It's showing signs of an atmosphere and a tail, hence it's a comet.

    • You mean the Comet Empire [archive.org]?

      How fast can we resurrect the Yamato?
    • Yes, that news came through last night.

      Well, "coma". "Atmosphere" in only the most temporary of senses. The average particle won't bump into another particle before it has left the vicinity of the comet and half way across the inner solar system.

      As of this lunch time, nobody was reporting a visible tail that I'd seen. It's coming fairly straight-on towards us - about 15 off-direct, I estimate, so we'll struggle to see past the head for a while. Come ... August (?), we'll have a bit of an angle to it and see

  • Man this Superman marketing budget must be crazy. Or possibly it's an F4 promo? But then it would be a little late.

  • ... prepare your enemas !!!
  • Klendathu are just dialing in their aim...

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