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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: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday October 27 2017, @05:01PM (18 children)
While we don't really know, since we haven't been tracking these things for that long, it's likely that interstellar asteroids don't pass this close by Earth all that often. So it's sad that we don't have our space program built up enough to take advantage of this possibly rare opportunity to study this object. We've launched probes to investigate other planets, moons, asteroids, and comets, but these are all products of our own system, so they tell us a lot about how our system formed, but an object like this can give us a very different perspective since it's not a product of the formation of our solar system. We really should be launching a lander to study it, return samples, etc. But there's probably no way we could get one ready and launched in time to intercept this thing; it'll be headed out of the solar system before we can launch, and moving too fast for our probe to catch up.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Friday October 27 2017, @05:16PM
I have compiled a list of the perfect people to put on the probe to study the next object on a fast transition in and out of the solar system.
Let me see if I can attach the file for your review. It's called ArkB.lst.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 27 2017, @08:24PM (10 children)
A/2017 U1 was discovered Oct. 19th. It had been inbound before it was detected, it whipped around the sun and was outbound already when we first saw it.
So unless you were bemoaning the lack of FTL drive, there's no amount of "built up" that would allow us to have a spare satellite on a launcher, launch it, and chase down this little rock. Just a reminder, Star Trek is fiction.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday October 27 2017, @08:47PM (7 children)
If we had a more robust presence in space capable of detecting asteroids in or near the inner solar system, we should have detected it much sooner. We didn't see it until it was too late for the same reason we've been caught with our pants down many times, where we detected an asteroid that came somewhat close to hitting the planet but we only saw it after it had already gone by. There's no excuse for that.
I'm not bemoaning the lack of sci-fi technology, I'm bemoaning the lack of sufficient hardware in space at our own current level of technology. We already have the technology to see these things long before we currently detect them, we just choose not to fund programs to build them. Space-based telescopes are not like FTL drive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @09:03PM (1 child)
But it seems unlikely that any reasonable such program would have seen this one. It came in at a right angle to every other asteroid near us ever (that we've recorded.)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 28 2017, @02:18AM
Perhaps. But I like to think that if we had a decent number of space telescopes out there monitoring the solar system, from different vantage points, we would have seen this one. While most asteroids are indeed in the same plane as our planetary orbits, because of the way our system formed, interstellar objects are more likely to come in at different angles so if we had sufficient observation capability, why wouldn't we spend a little time looking there?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:17AM (4 children)
What exactly is the hurry? It's not like we're blowing this task off. Detection is getting there rather rapidly even if it's not quite as rapid as you'd like.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 30 2017, @01:42AM (3 children)
What's the hurry in detecting *this* rock, or any rock?
First, I'm not getting any younger, so there's that. Second, being able to detect any rock is important because you never know when the next city-killer or civilization-killer is going to come along, and the earlier you know about it, the more time you have to come up with a workable defense plan. If you know a K-T-sized asteroid is coming and will impact in 100 years, that's enough time for us to figure out how to launch some ion engines or whatever up there and start pushing on it to move it to a safer orbit. But if we screw around for decades and then find out it's going to hit us in a year, there's probably no way we'll be able to avoid it. 100 years ago, we didn't know about asteroids like this; these days, we know that one likely killed off the dinosaurs and caused an enormous extinction event, plus we know about other ones that caused massive destruction in Earth's history. And these days, humans are far more populous and spread out than ever before, so there's a lot more chance of any impactor causing great loss of human life.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 30 2017, @03:16AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 30 2017, @02:21PM (1 child)
This is a pretty big danger, as proven by the K-T extinction event, the Tunguska, event, the strike a few years ago in Russia, etc. But also, technologies developed for countering asteroid threats can also be profitable: they can be used to learn about asteroids, and find asteroids that can be mined, and then capture these asteroids to be mined (after all, if you can move an asteroid to a safer orbit, you can also move it to a place advantageous for mining). So money spent on developing these capabilities wouldn't just be "wasted" on a low-probability threat; some of these rocks are worth a lot of money.
As for detecting 10m asteroids with off-the-shelf technologies, I'm not so sure about that. Seeing things that small surely would require space-based observatories, and those aren't cheap (nor would I call them "off the shelf").
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 30 2017, @04:08PM
Nor will there be much change in the profitability of these technologies if they're deployed twenty years from now since we aren't mining asteroids in the next twenty years.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:43AM (1 child)
I would say we'd have little hope of catching a rock like this. It's going to be going faster than the escape velocity of the solar system, and we've only managed to get a small handful of objects up to that kind of speed. And in the case of this rock, it's going about 50% faster than the Voyager probes. And there's no time to do any planetary fly-bys either.
Given that, your only real hope would be some kind of impacter you would maneuver in the way and let it slam into it. Given it did actually get get really close to Earth (by space standards) - the New Horizon's probe was launched at about 58,000 km/h which is only a couple of days travel time from the point of the closest point it got to the Earth. So sending a mission to this object isn't completely unfeasible given current technology.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday October 29 2017, @09:55AM
The real problem is whether we've figured out the motion of the object well enough to find it again centuries from now. There will be a considerable bit of error in the positioning of the object and it's going to be a challenge to find such a small object again in a few centuries. For example, if the error in velocity is a omnidirectional 100 m/s, in oh, 5 centuries, that would be 10 AU radius volume to search through (roughly from the orbit of Saturn on in). I think they'll do much better than that, but it's still going to be a huge stretch of space to search through.
(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.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday October 27 2017, @08:57PM
Maybe we can still get our hands at some dust of this thing because it passed relatively close to Earth? Would be interesting to know its composition.