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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: 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.