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Astronomer Rob Weryk has identified what appears to be the first interstellar object to enter (and soon exit) the solar system. The object, provisionally designated A/2017 U1, is estimated to be 400 meters in diameter:
A/2017 U1 was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, during the course of its nightly search for near-Earth objects for NASA. Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), was first to identify the moving object and submit it to the Minor Planet Center. Weryk subsequently searched the Pan-STARRS image archive and found it also was in images taken the previous night, but was not initially identified by the moving object processing.
[...] "This is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen," said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back."
The CNEOS team plotted the object's current trajectory and even looked into its future. A/2017 U1 came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, cruising through interstellar space at a brisk clip of 15.8 miles (25.5 kilometers) per second.
The object approached our solar system from almost directly "above" the ecliptic, the approximate plane in space where the planets and most asteroids orbit the Sun, so it did not have any close encounters with the eight major planets during its plunge toward the Sun. On Sept. 2, the small body crossed under the ecliptic plane just inside of Mercury's orbit and then made its closest approach to the Sun on Sept. 9. Pulled by the Sun's gravity, the object made a hairpin turn under our solar system, passing under Earth's orbit on Oct. 14 at a distance of about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) -- about 60 times the distance to the Moon. It has now shot back up above the plane of the planets and, travelling at 27 miles per second (44 kilometers per second) with respect to the Sun, the object is speeding toward the constellation Pegasus.
"We have long suspected that these objects should exist, because during the process of planet formation a lot of material should be ejected from planetary systems. What's most surprising is that we've never seen interstellar objects pass through before," said Karen Meech, an astronomer at the IfA specializing in small bodies and their connection to solar system formation.
Here is a direct link to an animation of the object's passage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @08:56PM (4 children)
"we haven't been tracking these things for that long"
really? stop already.
the biggest danger to this planet is the human!
even if it would hit us, there would be NO use to chronicle it, because we would all be dead or to busy surviving to chronicle it, unless some political part survives.
statistically, and we love statisticalls? yes? there's no way that people still using android will every get hit and die out by an asteroid
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 27 2017, @09:16PM (3 children)
400 meters in diameter doesn't come close to an extinction event. Just modest urban renewal.
Think a little over twice as big as Meteor Crater in New Mexico, where 150-foot-wide chunk of iron-nickel instantly carved out what is still the planet’s most well-preserved meteorite impact site.
The Chicxulub impactor may have been about 10 km (6 miles) across and formed a world wide irridium layer and killed off most of the dinosaurs - enabling...us.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 28 2017, @02:25AM (2 children)
It's not quite that simple: the destructive energy of an asteroid is a product of its size, its velocity relative to Earth, its angle of entry into the atmosphere, and its composition. A 150-ft wide rock going 20 times as fast as the Meteor Crater site is Arizona (not New Mexico) is likely going to do a lot more damage than the crater seen there. Also, that crater is probably well-preserved mainly because it's relatively young. The Chicxulub crater is hard to see any more (even though it's enormous) because 66 million years have passed, instead of only 50,000. A lot of erosion has happened in 66M years (plus it's partly in the water, which causes even more erosion than high desert like where Barringer Crater is).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday October 28 2017, @06:14AM (1 child)
Its every bit as simple as that. You, nor anyone else has any real idea of the speed of impact of any of the impactors that have hit earth in the distant past.
Where something hit has little to do with the damage done. The 6KM impactor at Chicxulub managed to cover the earh with a layer of iridium that is unmistakable in the geological record. The 150 foot solid steal impactor at Meteor Crater air burst, and left very little of itself anywhere. Not even in the crater. Why? Because atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry and breakup. Speed doesn't matter much with small impactors. There's sort of a tall poppy syndrome at work with small meteors. The faster they come the more they burn and break up. Even metallic ones.
The duration that the crater persists has absolute nothing, nothing to do with the case.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 29 2017, @09:29AM
However, the impact that is thought to have ended the dinosaurs was about 7 orders of magnitude larger than the Meteor Crater impact. At that point, an asteroid would need to be going a significant fraction of the speed of light.