Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of interstellar objects racing through our solar system – only the third has ever been seen, although scientists suspect that even more may slip over.
The visitor from the stars, appointed by 3I/Atlas, is probably the highest, but was detected and was classified as a comet or cosmic snowball.
“It seems peculiarly vague,” Peter Veres, an astronomer with the center of the Small Planet of the International Astronomical Union, which was responsible for official approval, told AFP.
“It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.”
Initially known as the A11pl3z, the object is not a threat to the Earth until it is confirmed that it is of interstellar origin, said Richard Moisslo, the European Space Agency’s planetary defense manager.
“It will fly deep through the solar system, going straight to Mars orbit,” but will not hit our neighboring planet, he said AFP.
Related astronomers still improve their calculations, but the object seems to increase more than 60 kilometers (37 miles) per second.
This would mean that it is not bound by the orbit of the sun, unlike the objects that remain in the solar system.
Its trajectory also means that it does not tempt our stars, but it comes from interstellar space and flying to there again, ”Moisslo said.
“We believe that these small ice balls are probably associated with star systems,” added Jonathan McDowell, a astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center. “And then as another star passes, wearing a ball of ice, it liberates. It is unfair, tempting through the galaxy, and now it just passes us.”
In Chile, the Observatory, which is part of the NASA -funded Atlas survey, discovered the object for the first time on Tuesday.
Then professional and amateur astronomers around the world were looking for previous telescope data, tracing its trajectory at least until June 14th.
The object is believed to be about 10 to 20 kilometers wide, Moisslo said, so it will do the largest intersection of the interlocutor ever detected. But the object can be smaller if it is made of ice, which reflects more light.
Veres said the object would continue to brighten, as the sun approaches, bending a little after gravity, and is expected to be October 29th. It will reach the nearest point – perhelion.
Then, in the next few years, he will withdraw and leave the solar system.
– Our third visitor –
It only marks the third time when humanity detected an object entering the solar system from the stars.
The first Oumamua was found in 2017. It was so strange that at least one famous scientist made sure that it was a stranger – although it has since contradicted further research.
Our second interstellar visitor 2i/Borisov was spotted in 2019.
There is no reason to suspect the artificial origin of the 3I/atlas, but all teams in the world are now racing to answer the most important questions about things like its form, composition and rotation.
AFP, astronomer of the UK Central University of Lancashir, told AFP that the new object seems to “move much faster than the other two extraseolary objects we have previously discovered.”
The object is currently approximately a distance from Jupiter, far from the ground, Norris said.
Norris pointed out the modeling, considering that at any time there may be as many as 10,000 interstar objects drifting through the solar system, although most of them would be smaller than the newly discovered object.
If it is true, it shows that the newly online Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could soon find these weak intersections every month, Norris said.
Moisslo said it was impossible to send a mission to space to take over a new object.
However, these visitors offer scientists a rare opportunity to explore something outside our solar system.
For example, if we found the predecessors of life, such as amino acids on such an object, it would give us “much more confidence that life conditions exist in other star systems,” Norris said.
Dl-i/JGC