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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 22 2017, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the ask-Sigmund-Freud dept.

For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. The new results appear in the journal Nature on 20 November 2017.

On 19 October 2017, the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i picked up a faint point of light moving across the sky. It initially looked like a typical fast-moving small asteroid, but additional observations over the next couple of days allowed its orbit to be computed fairly accurately. The orbit calculations revealed beyond any doubt that this body did not originate from inside the Solar System, like all other asteroids or comets ever observed, but instead had come from interstellar space. Although originally classified as a comet, observations from ESO and elsewhere revealed no signs of cometary activity after it passed closest to the Sun in September 2017. The object was reclassified as an interstellar asteroid and named 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua)[1].

"We had to act quickly," explains team member Olivier Hainaut from ESO in Garching, Germany. "`Oumuamua had already passed its closest point to the Sun and was heading back into interstellar space."

... [1] The Pan-STARRS team’s proposal to name the interstellar objet[sic] was accepted by the International Astronomical Union, which is responsible for granting official names to bodies in the Solar System and beyond. The name is Hawaiian and more details are given here. The IAU also created a new class of objects for interstellar asteroids, with this object being the first to receive this designation. The correct forms for referring to this object are now: 1I, 1I/2017 U1, 1I/`Oumuamua and 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua). Note that the character before the O is an okina. So, the name should sound like H O u mu a mu a. Before the introduction of the new scheme, the object was referred to as A/2017 U1.

http://eso.org/public/news/eso1737

-- submitted from IRC. See also here.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @08:58PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 23 2017, @08:58PM (#600818) Journal
    Even at those dimensions you can fit a lot of people on board. The International Space Station (ISS) has a volume of 930 cubic meters and fits 6 astronauts in relative comfort. A cylindrical spacecraft of 100 meters length and 30 meters diameter, would have a volume of 71,000 cubic meters, roughly 75 ISS's in volume. Hence, a population of 450 people could live in similar densities as the ISS. The population would be limited more by available power than volume.

    The actual length of the object is roughly 400 meters and 40 meters diameter. That's 500k cubic meters which is roughly 540 ISS in volume. Then you're speaking of several thousand people living in the same concentrations as on the ISS.
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