Have we gotten better at detecting these objects in the past 5 years or is the solar system going through a bumpy area of Milky Way lately? We have observed (or I have heard about) many interstellar objects in the past five years than any previous times.
There has been a significant increase in NEO observation projects in the last eight years and there’s one coming online soon that should increase the detection capabilities even more.
Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
2I/Borisov was not discovered by Zwicky Transient Facility .
The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have been getting steadily cheaper and better, which leads to more amateur comet hunters each watching more sky, which has rapidly improved the odds of catching rare objects.
I'm not sure how the progress of institutional and amateur observations compare. Obviously the big guys benefit from the same technological advancement, but I don't know whether the fraction of new objects discovered by amateurs has been growing or not. I suspect the odds of the first interstellar object being found by an amateur were still pretty long.
Computing Power has increased tremendously, along with the higher resolution of digital imaging technology compared to analog film plates. Sky Survey projects like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have become active in recent years, which generate Terabytes of spectrographic data each night which can be rapidly examined for differences from previous captures. In the past each exposure had to be hand-aligned on a Light table and “flipped” between to spot differences.
From wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have been discovered traveling through the Solar System: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025"
I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
It's detection, not a particularly crowded area of space. These rocks are hard to see, and one needs at least 3 observations (in theory, but in practice more) to compute their path and determine that they're extrasolar. Within 5 years we'll probably be detecting several of them a week.
It’s worth noting that we went from wondering if other stars had planets to hitting 6000 detected so far in about four decades with just 33 years since the first discovery of an exoplanet (and 30 years since one was found orbiting a main-sequence star—that first was actually two planets which orbited a neutron star).
Somewhere in the galaxy, silicon-based lifeforms who enjoy swimming in molten lead have trained their telescopes on our solar system and mapped it. They have assumed all the planets here are incapable of supporting life, except for the second one: It's right in their habitable zone. Their ships are speeding toward Venus as we speak.
If _some_ kind of life is possible in Venus, shouldn't Venus have it?
That's how life works on Earth. If it _can_ live somewhere, it's probably already there. We think that's related to how it can survive and adapt, so it's reasonable to assume other life would be similar in that regard.
Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain any life, it should already be there.
I know it sounds weird. What if life never got there? Well, it had plenty of opportunity. The universe is old and lots of things happened in it already.
Maybe life is a late addition to the universe, and we're one of the first instances of it. Or maybe it's rare, and we're lucky. Both the "life is new" and "life is rare" ideas, however, paint a picture of Earth being a special case somehow. "We are a special case" is not a very satisfying answer though (from the scientific point of view).
5 years ago space got a whole force dedicated to it in the US. Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts? The timing is an interesting coincidence if anything.
FWIW, HN values directness and precision, even in questions. I bet if you'd said "Did increased military spending have anything to do with this?" you'd get a quick answer "no" and few downvotes; but what you actually said was "Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts" with a question mark on the end, and I expect HN was reacting to that.
I had dinner with one of the co-authors Wednesday night. He's doubling down on the "significance" test that has H0 that all possible incoming trajectories are equally likely.
He's convinced it's an essentially a local phenomenon. I look forward to how he spins this paper.
No, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded.
He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.
If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.
I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?
I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.
And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").
that's not what an open mind is though. an open mind is one that is willing to question what is inside as much as it is willing to question what is outside.
a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
My favorite piece of media is Contact (book and movie).
Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.
Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
Um, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing.
But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.
There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
Very little observing involves just the eyes. much of what we observe relies on millennia of assumptions. if we don't consider alternatives that we would normally reject out of hand, we can miss things.
Seems reasonable that an alien craft travelling between stars might want to illuminate the whole star system to detect dark objects and plot a safe or more perfect course.
Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.
Sure, if the biases are actually irrational, but in this case the biases are things like "idk maybe we should follow the scientific method", while Loeb pushes "here's an idea that is unfalsifiable and untestable, but look its peer reviewed and its on a harvard domain name so you have to pay attention to me".
Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.
I am open minded, but Arthur Clarke solved it. If it was alien it would have slingshotted around the sun. Unless it is on collision course with a planet or using the sun to modify its course towards another star - you can assume that it is not alien and functioning.
His Galileo Project is explicitly looking for “extraterrestrial technological signatures”, and he’s just using any opportunity for hype about that.
He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait.
It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.
Genuinely curious: what could the Mars rover possibly capture about this object that other instruments cannot? Is it our highest resolution imagery in the vicinity of Mars?
Not much, but just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting. There's a probable capture of it from Perseverance here (it's just a tiny faint smudge):
When you look at images of the comet Siding Spring made from Mars surface and orbit, it’s clear that neither of the instruments are really well suited for that type of observation. In such case, you just use everything you have and hope for the best.
I supposed that depends on if the object deploys a probe to go take a selfie with the rover? Would be a damn shame to miss capturing evidence of it up close and personal...
my favourite sci-fi idea about this is that the aliens know we love shiny things so they give us a comet to look at while they have their annual picnic somewhere nearby.
It is amazing how in under 100 years, we go from first object in space to controlling several spacecrafts in Mars orbit/surface in order to observe a specific object in the sky.
> it’s traveling through our solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour (210,000 kph). That’s the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system visitor.
so that's the fastest (macro & reachable) thing ever - good luck sticking a flag on it
Trip to Mars (~its closest point) is much longer than time we had. The chances the next one will be close enough to Earth and low enough speed so it can be matched is astronomically low and such interceptor would be quite expensive
Astronomy usually has that kind of "Lovecraftian" sense of cosmic insignificance when you put things to sacale. Also, being alone at 3am in the middle of nowhere, cold and kind of sleepy, looking at a gas cloud lightyears away, adds to it. But it is also fascinating.
honestly the times I was on a proper telescope, I was shitting myself making sure I made the most of the time going down my list of targets and not getting something wrong and pointing at the wrong star or getting the wrong setting. that and the daemon that had to be restarted every half an hour or so because it crashed. I did not have the energy or time for philosophy. I guess that's the difference between the phd student and the professor haha!
I'm quite hopeful that anyone under 40 (arbitrary, mostly because I'm in my mid-30s) will get to LEV (longevity escape velocity) - there's a ton of anti-ageing and disease-curing research going on, especially now with the likes of DeepMind and others accelerating said research.
That's assuming you manage to avoid death from microplastics, climate change or AI-related societal collapse, etc.
I may be super naive here, but are we really defining "close" or is it that the object is close enough that it makes sense to point our objects that are close to Jupiter at the new object?
It is passing between two point in our night sky. I believe from a plane view, if you look at our universe from the perspective of it laying flat, it is my understanding the spin of our universe means that everything ends up within a flat plane, so in a 3 dimensional space, we have a limited Y axis. The other planets are spaced out across the X and Y axis, this is passing between or across two points.
Am I thinking of this right? I know very little about astronomy.
There’s no evidence that the universe is spinning. The observable universe is not a flat plane - we see galaxies in all directions and at all distances.
You may be thinking of our galaxy (the Milky Way) or even our solar system, which both rotate and as such are both somewhat flattened (the solar system much more so than the galaxy.)
But what’s happening here has little to do with that. If you imagine the closest distance that Earth gets to Mars as a yardstick, 3I/Atlas is about half that yardstick’s distance from Mars right now - much closer than Earth ever gets. It’s practically in Mars’ back yard.
It's Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) and it's not yet anywhere near Jupiter. Its trajectory has a few slingshot loops around Venus and Earth, and it's just coming off the Venus encounter.
It's about 0.43 AU from the comet at its nearest, whereas Earth will be pretty much on the opposite side of the Sun, making observations difficult from here.
Edit: Earth, Mars and Jupiter are in roughly 120 degrees from each other as seen from the Sun, with the Earth-Sun-Jupiter angle closing up fast and the E-S-M angle growing slightly slower. In about two months the E-S-M angle will be 180.
How likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
That's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hammering in all the time, not that the first ones you see are particularly special, even if one of them seems to be making a statistically unlikely near approach to Mars.
Surely no one was actually thinking there weren't exoplanets though. We didn't need experimental proof that they exist to be reasonably sure that they do.
The existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians are pretty sure it is, but they don’t know for sure.
Then I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!).
Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
The other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)
We have only recently been able to detect them at scale, so we should not confuse first ones detected with first ones to arrive in the solar system. It’s just as likely they are the tail end of a debris cloud, but our detection tech wasn’t up to spotting all the previous ones.
There is a lot of darkness, and we can only look in so many places. We tend to look along the plane of our elliptic because that is where everything in our solar system is. Looking elsewhere is possible, but increasingly lonely/low odds.
Thats correct. Some groups have. More groups refuse to break the Hatch Act and take partisan sides.
Theres a LOT of people who work for the government that want to do a good job, and faithfully keep doing what they're paid to do. Administrations dont matter. The mission does. And that mission goes year by year.
Looks like you were downvoted by someone who either thought you were kidding, thought you were posting false partisan flamebait, or thinks that the language used by the Trump administration is just peachy keen. Regardless, they were wrong.
"Oh, my God! That's the intergalactic mail van from Xenorph 44! We won't get any more supplies for another century!888----<((( Gaaah! Nothing to eat but Earthlings...."
- overheard on Avi Loeb's radio telescope, but fortunately mis-translated.
Well nothing much in hard vacuum is "fiery" - comets in our solar system do get ablated by the solar wind as they orbit the sun more closely; I assume in this case the majority of those billions of years were in deep space where there wasn't much pushing/pulling mass off.
Whether it's drifting through space or hammering through at dozens of kilometres a second is rather a matter of perspective. Perhaps as far as it's concerned, its sedate drift has been interrupted by a very ill-mannered solar system making a reckless close pass.
Tangentially, I enjoy reminding my kids how long it takes our star to complete a rotation around the Milky Way, and then also point out that we can go to a museum and see fossils of what life looked like one galactic rotation ago. It gives the right amount of backward and forward perspective about the rock we live on that I want them to keep tucked away in the corner of their mind.
It could be extra-galactic. It's going at a fair clip, and (if I haven't dropped a zero or ten) it would only take around 800 million years to get here from one of the Magellanic Clouds.
Just as an indicator of the speed and possible distances.
> “But based on the researchers’ analyses of the interstellar object’s vertical motion in the galaxy (its path is known to weave up and down in the galactic disk), they concluded that it likely originated from the Milky Way’s thin disk, not its thick disk as was mentioned some months ago. The thin disk contains somewhat younger objects than the thick disk.”
If it were traveling through interstellar space, it would have been highly irradiated but it would also have been far from any source of heat. From what we know of it so far, it has some strange chemistry going on, but that’s somewhat expected given its estimated age. We’d also need to assume that a few billion years of interstellar radiation would do strange things we haven’t really seen before hence pointing every instrument possible at it.
Have we gotten better at detecting these objects in the past 5 years or is the solar system going through a bumpy area of Milky Way lately? We have observed (or I have heard about) many interstellar objects in the past five years than any previous times.
There has been a significant increase in NEO observation projects in the last eight years and there’s one coming online soon that should increase the detection capabilities even more.
Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
2I/Borisov was not discovered by Zwicky Transient Facility .
The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
That’s interesting. If it was possible to do on a homemade telescope, then why were no interstellar objects discovered before 1A?
The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have been getting steadily cheaper and better, which leads to more amateur comet hunters each watching more sky, which has rapidly improved the odds of catching rare objects.
I'm not sure how the progress of institutional and amateur observations compare. Obviously the big guys benefit from the same technological advancement, but I don't know whether the fraction of new objects discovered by amateurs has been growing or not. I suspect the odds of the first interstellar object being found by an amateur were still pretty long.
Computing Power has increased tremendously, along with the higher resolution of digital imaging technology compared to analog film plates. Sky Survey projects like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have become active in recent years, which generate Terabytes of spectrographic data each night which can be rapidly examined for differences from previous captures. In the past each exposure had to be hand-aligned on a Light table and “flipped” between to spot differences.
From wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have been discovered traveling through the Solar System: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025"
I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
It's detection, not a particularly crowded area of space. These rocks are hard to see, and one needs at least 3 observations (in theory, but in practice more) to compute their path and determine that they're extrasolar. Within 5 years we'll probably be detecting several of them a week.
It’s worth noting that we went from wondering if other stars had planets to hitting 6000 detected so far in about four decades with just 33 years since the first discovery of an exoplanet (and 30 years since one was found orbiting a main-sequence star—that first was actually two planets which orbited a neutron star).
A funny overview of the recent history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw
Somewhere in the galaxy, silicon-based lifeforms who enjoy swimming in molten lead have trained their telescopes on our solar system and mapped it. They have assumed all the planets here are incapable of supporting life, except for the second one: It's right in their habitable zone. Their ships are speeding toward Venus as we speak.
If _some_ kind of life is possible in Venus, shouldn't Venus have it?
That's how life works on Earth. If it _can_ live somewhere, it's probably already there. We think that's related to how it can survive and adapt, so it's reasonable to assume other life would be similar in that regard.
Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain any life, it should already be there.
I know it sounds weird. What if life never got there? Well, it had plenty of opportunity. The universe is old and lots of things happened in it already.
Maybe life is a late addition to the universe, and we're one of the first instances of it. Or maybe it's rare, and we're lucky. Both the "life is new" and "life is rare" ideas, however, paint a picture of Earth being a special case somehow. "We are a special case" is not a very satisfying answer though (from the scientific point of view).
5 years ago space got a whole force dedicated to it in the US. Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts? The timing is an interesting coincidence if anything.
We know exactly who discovered these objects, what tech they were using, and where the funding came from, and it wasn’t from space force.
"we" does not include me, which is why I posed it as a question, and made the allowance that it's at least an interesting coincidence to me.
I'm not sure why that warrants a flood of downvotes, especially increasing after your message called me out, but hey I guess that's HN now.
FWIW, HN values directness and precision, even in questions. I bet if you'd said "Did increased military spending have anything to do with this?" you'd get a quick answer "no" and few downvotes; but what you actually said was "Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts" with a question mark on the end, and I expect HN was reacting to that.
Looking forward to seeing what images they received, especially after Avi Loeb's comments on it.
I had dinner with one of the co-authors Wednesday night. He's doubling down on the "significance" test that has H0 that all possible incoming trajectories are equally likely.
He's convinced it's an essentially a local phenomenon. I look forward to how he spins this paper.
Avi’s the new “it’s Aliens” meme guy
No, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded.
He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.
If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.
He was well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind too far and it falls out of the cranium.
I think 3I/Atlas is a comet.
But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.
I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
“What if” is just fine.
Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
Does he though? Honestly I haven't seen it.
I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?
I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.
And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").
[1]: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
There's an excellent quote from the WH40k universe:
that's not what an open mind is though. an open mind is one that is willing to question what is inside as much as it is willing to question what is outside.
a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
My favorite piece of media is Contact (book and movie).
Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.
Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
One of my other favorite piece of media is the intro of a Rick and Morty episode parodying the plot of contact. Highly recommended.
I missed that. I’ll have to look it up.
Um, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing.
But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.
There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
> There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
Didn’t Galileo collect evidence first?
"What if it's an alien artifact?" - We're going to observe it.
"What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it.
That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
Very little observing involves just the eyes. much of what we observe relies on millennia of assumptions. if we don't consider alternatives that we would normally reject out of hand, we can miss things.
Space agencies are already pointing every single instrument they can at this thing.
I bet the aliens are having an annual picnic in the opposite direction!
Last I checked, he was making claims well beyond that.
"What if 3I/Atlas is responsible for the Wow! Signal?!" is one of the sillier ones
He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability
Seems reasonable that an alien craft travelling between stars might want to illuminate the whole star system to detect dark objects and plot a safe or more perfect course.
Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.
Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.
Well, you know what they say; don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
Nonsense. Open minded means not precluding possibilities based on irrational bias, which would only increases intelligence.
Sure, if the biases are actually irrational, but in this case the biases are things like "idk maybe we should follow the scientific method", while Loeb pushes "here's an idea that is unfalsifiable and untestable, but look its peer reviewed and its on a harvard domain name so you have to pay attention to me".
Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.
I am open minded, but Arthur Clarke solved it. If it was alien it would have slingshotted around the sun. Unless it is on collision course with a planet or using the sun to modify its course towards another star - you can assume that it is not alien and functioning.
Fwiw, Avi's hypothesis for Oumuamua was not that it was functioning, but that it was old, defunct light sail.
His Galileo Project is explicitly looking for “extraterrestrial technological signatures”, and he’s just using any opportunity for hype about that.
He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait.
It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.
Here's an interview of his on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0xB3EtQX0
I was surprised to recently learn that NASA has aimed pretty much everything it has at 3I/Atlas, even the Perseverance Mars rover! <https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/>
Genuinely curious: what could the Mars rover possibly capture about this object that other instruments cannot? Is it our highest resolution imagery in the vicinity of Mars?
Not much, but just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting. There's a probable capture of it from Perseverance here (it's just a tiny faint smudge):
https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlw...
> just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting
It would be funny if it behaves "as expected" when in the range of our instruments, but not when it thinks we can't see it :)
Every confirmation is a data point.
When you look at images of the comet Siding Spring made from Mars surface and orbit, it’s clear that neither of the instruments are really well suited for that type of observation. In such case, you just use everything you have and hope for the best.
I supposed that depends on if the object deploys a probe to go take a selfie with the rover? Would be a damn shame to miss capturing evidence of it up close and personal...
my favourite sci-fi idea about this is that the aliens know we love shiny things so they give us a comet to look at while they have their annual picnic somewhere nearby.
It is amazing how in under 100 years, we go from first object in space to controlling several spacecrafts in Mars orbit/surface in order to observe a specific object in the sky.
> it’s traveling through our solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour (210,000 kph). That’s the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system visitor.
so that's the fastest (macro & reachable) thing ever - good luck sticking a flag on it
Why don't we have an interceptor ready to go for the next one?
Trip to Mars (~its closest point) is much longer than time we had. The chances the next one will be close enough to Earth and low enough speed so it can be matched is astronomically low and such interceptor would be quite expensive
A flyby is fine, and I'm willing to explore some 1960's propulsion solutions.
And NASA shutdown
Don’t Look Up!
the thought of this frozen rock drifting through space for billions of years fills me with existential dread :(
Astronomy usually has that kind of "Lovecraftian" sense of cosmic insignificance when you put things to sacale. Also, being alone at 3am in the middle of nowhere, cold and kind of sleepy, looking at a gas cloud lightyears away, adds to it. But it is also fascinating.
honestly the times I was on a proper telescope, I was shitting myself making sure I made the most of the time going down my list of targets and not getting something wrong and pointing at the wrong star or getting the wrong setting. that and the daemon that had to be restarted every half an hour or so because it crashed. I did not have the energy or time for philosophy. I guess that's the difference between the phd student and the professor haha!
Quite the opposite for me. I’m fascinated and inspired by the fact that this rock escaped the gravity well of one star and is now visiting another.
Wait until you hear what Earth has been up to in that same time.
Now think about how "lucky" this one is it got to float through a solar system.
80 years (if lucky) is an unfathomably cruel prank and a prison.
I'm quite hopeful that anyone under 40 (arbitrary, mostly because I'm in my mid-30s) will get to LEV (longevity escape velocity) - there's a ton of anti-ageing and disease-curing research going on, especially now with the likes of DeepMind and others accelerating said research.
That's assuming you manage to avoid death from microplastics, climate change or AI-related societal collapse, etc.
How likely is it that a random object from outside the solar system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
I may be super naive here, but are we really defining "close" or is it that the object is close enough that it makes sense to point our objects that are close to Jupiter at the new object?
It is passing between two point in our night sky. I believe from a plane view, if you look at our universe from the perspective of it laying flat, it is my understanding the spin of our universe means that everything ends up within a flat plane, so in a 3 dimensional space, we have a limited Y axis. The other planets are spaced out across the X and Y axis, this is passing between or across two points.
Am I thinking of this right? I know very little about astronomy.
There’s no evidence that the universe is spinning. The observable universe is not a flat plane - we see galaxies in all directions and at all distances.
You may be thinking of our galaxy (the Milky Way) or even our solar system, which both rotate and as such are both somewhat flattened (the solar system much more so than the galaxy.)
But what’s happening here has little to do with that. If you imagine the closest distance that Earth gets to Mars as a yardstick, 3I/Atlas is about half that yardstick’s distance from Mars right now - much closer than Earth ever gets. It’s practically in Mars’ back yard.
> There’s no evidence that the universe is spinning.
True, but if it were that would solve some problems in observations:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/4/3038/8090496?lo...
Thanks for clarifying that. And you're right, I was referring to our solar system, not the universe.
It's in Mars' backyard, but was it, or will it also be in Jupiter's backyard? I couldn't understand that from the original post.
It seemed to me that it was just that our telescopes/cameras near Jupiter would be pointed in that direction.
It's Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) and it's not yet anywhere near Jupiter. Its trajectory has a few slingshot loops around Venus and Earth, and it's just coming off the Venus encounter.
It's about 0.43 AU from the comet at its nearest, whereas Earth will be pretty much on the opposite side of the Sun, making observations difficult from here.
Edit: Earth, Mars and Jupiter are in roughly 120 degrees from each other as seen from the Sun, with the Earth-Sun-Jupiter angle closing up fast and the E-S-M angle growing slightly slower. In about two months the E-S-M angle will be 180.
How likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
Shuffle a deck of cards, and statistically no one has ever shuffled the same sequence in all of human history.
It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards.
Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.
That's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hammering in all the time, not that the first ones you see are particularly special, even if one of them seems to be making a statistically unlikely near approach to Mars.
Yeah, like exoplanets. When I was in middle school there were none. Now there’s 6,000 confirmed ones.
Surely no one was actually thinking there weren't exoplanets though. We didn't need experimental proof that they exist to be reasonably sure that they do.
The existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians are pretty sure it is, but they don’t know for sure.
I’m curious how unlikely it is. Seems very, very unlikely to pass by 2 major planets.
Any path it could possibly take is equally unlikely.
It is. It’s similarly unlikely that I win the lottery. But someone always does!
The situations are in no way analogous.
Sure they are. There are likely trillions of these things. We are likely gonna see them everywhere. Like scratch-off lottery cards.
We have seen 3.
Aliens have been doing this every few years for 250,000 years but we've just only managed to build barely decent telescopes ;)
Pretty likely if there are a lot of them!
Then I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!).
Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
In fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its name.
The other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)
I wonder if we are going through a debris cloud and these are just the first small objects.
We have only recently been able to detect them at scale, so we should not confuse first ones detected with first ones to arrive in the solar system. It’s just as likely they are the tail end of a debris cloud, but our detection tech wasn’t up to spotting all the previous ones.
I find this to be an interesting thought.
This one is anything but small.
zero. It must be the Borg after the time jump.
Any object not doing so is very unlikely to be seen by us.
Why so?
There is a lot of darkness, and we can only look in so many places. We tend to look along the plane of our elliptic because that is where everything in our solar system is. Looking elsewhere is possible, but increasingly lonely/low odds.
I don’t know if that applies to the sky surveys.
1) they are new 2) they are still limited in coverage area (https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/FinderChart/docs/...)
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/ interesting blurb at the top of the site... "Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website."
at least it's not saying "thanks to the radical left democrats" like other govt websites
Some departments have even added similar language to employees' e-mail out-of-office messages.
Thats correct. Some groups have. More groups refuse to break the Hatch Act and take partisan sides.
Theres a LOT of people who work for the government that want to do a good job, and faithfully keep doing what they're paid to do. Administrations dont matter. The mission does. And that mission goes year by year.
Well, until now.
> Theres a LOT of people who work for the government that want to do a good job, and faithfully keep doing what they're paid to do.
And the current administration calls those people “the deep state” and wants to get rid of them.
Looks like you were downvoted by someone who either thought you were kidding, thought you were posting false partisan flamebait, or thinks that the language used by the Trump administration is just peachy keen. Regardless, they were wrong.
https://abc7.com/post/government-websites-displaying-message...
https://www.hud.gov/
Good lord. That's worse than I'd heard.
We're pretty much hosed.
So far left, they are actually far right
"Oh, my God! That's the intergalactic mail van from Xenorph 44! We won't get any more supplies for another century!888----<((( Gaaah! Nothing to eat but Earthlings...."
- overheard on Avi Loeb's radio telescope, but fortunately mis-translated.
Was it glowing green?
Ulaaaaa!
> 3I/ATLAS is thought to have been drifting through interstellar space for many billions of years before encountering our solar system.
It is hard to believe, but it means it’s been a fiery comet for billions of years, how is that possible that it havent burned up…
Well nothing much in hard vacuum is "fiery" - comets in our solar system do get ablated by the solar wind as they orbit the sun more closely; I assume in this case the majority of those billions of years were in deep space where there wasn't much pushing/pulling mass off.
Wind in a vacuum, that's interesting.
Yeah but then it wouldn’t be drifting would it?
Joke explanation: a drifting vehicle is burning tires and leaving a cloud of smoke behind, like a comet.
Whether it's drifting through space or hammering through at dozens of kilometres a second is rather a matter of perspective. Perhaps as far as it's concerned, its sedate drift has been interrupted by a very ill-mannered solar system making a reckless close pass.
Hopefully our solar system isn't making a reckless pass into the path of the fragments from a historic explosion and we're just seeing the first few.
Yes, the solar system is moving (rotating) relative to the galactic core at 230 KM/s, far faster than this object is moving relative to us.
Depending on its origin/history, it’s getting run over by a runaway train, or taking a sedate walk.
Tangentially, I enjoy reminding my kids how long it takes our star to complete a rotation around the Milky Way, and then also point out that we can go to a museum and see fossils of what life looked like one galactic rotation ago. It gives the right amount of backward and forward perspective about the rock we live on that I want them to keep tucked away in the corner of their mind.
This object is "moving" at roughly 58 km/s. It's doing a leisurely Sunday drive and getting overtaken by someone 3x their speed.
Because what makes it glow is actually solar wind from our sun as it passes through the solar system.
For possibly billions of years, it has simply been an inert lump of ice passing through the universe.
It could be extra-galactic. It's going at a fair clip, and (if I haven't dropped a zero or ten) it would only take around 800 million years to get here from one of the Magellanic Clouds.
Just as an indicator of the speed and possible distances.
> “But based on the researchers’ analyses of the interstellar object’s vertical motion in the galaxy (its path is known to weave up and down in the galactic disk), they concluded that it likely originated from the Milky Way’s thin disk, not its thick disk as was mentioned some months ago. The thin disk contains somewhat younger objects than the thick disk.”
If it were traveling through interstellar space, it would have been highly irradiated but it would also have been far from any source of heat. From what we know of it so far, it has some strange chemistry going on, but that’s somewhat expected given its estimated age. We’d also need to assume that a few billion years of interstellar radiation would do strange things we haven’t really seen before hence pointing every instrument possible at it.
Comets don’t do anything much until they get close to a star.