Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object that competes through our solar system – only the third ever spotted, although scientists suspect that they can sneak in unnoticed much more.
The visitor of the stars, marked 3I/Atlas, is probably the largest but still open, and is classified as a comet or space snowball.
“It seems kind of blurred,” Peter Veres, an astronomer of the International Planet Center for the International Astronomical Union, told AFP, which was responsible for official confirmation.
“It seems that there is gas around it and I think one or two telescope reports a very short tail.”
Initially known as the A11PL3Z, before it was confirmed that it was of interstellar origin, the site did not pose a threat to the land, said Richard Moyl, head of the planetary defense at the European Space Agency.
“He will fly deep through the solar system, passing right into the orbit of Mars,” but will not hit our neighboring planet, he told AFP.
Excited astronomers are still improving their calculations, but the object seems to increase more than 60 kilometers (37 miles) 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 orbit our star, but comes from the interstellar space and flies again,” Mosl said.
“We believe that these small ice balls are probably formed, related to star systems,” added Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithson Astrophysics Center. “And then, as he passes another star, he pulls the ice ball, releases him. She moves, wanders through the galaxy, and now this one just passes us.”
A Chile -based observatory, which is part of NASA’s Atlas survey, first opened the site on Tuesday.
After that, professional and amateur astronomers around the world searched during the past, a telescope, tracking their trajectory until at least 14 June.
The site is currently valued at about 10-20 kilometers, said Moyl, which would make it the largest interstellar interloper ever discovered. But the object can be less if it is made of ice, which reflects more light.
Veres said the object would continue to illuminate as the sun approaches, bending slightly under the weight of gravity and expected to reach its closer point – Perihelion – on October 29.
It will then retreat and leave the solar system in the next few years.
– Our third visitor –
This marks only the third time humanity has discovered an object entering the solar system of stars.
The first, “oumuamua, was discovered in 2017. It was so strange that at least one prominent scientist became convinced that he was an extraterrestrial ship – although this has been controversial since then.
Our second interstellar visitor 2i/Borisov was spotted in 2019.
There is no reason to suspect artificial origin for 3i/Atlas, but teams around the world now compete to answer key questions about things such as its shape, composition and rotation.
Mark Norris, an astronomer at the University of the United Kingdom in Central Lankashir, told the AFP that the new site seems to be “moving much more faster than the other two extrasolar sites we found earlier”.
Currently, the site is approximately the distance from Jupiter away from the ground, Norris said.
Norris pointed to the modeling, assessing that there may be up to 10,000 interstellar sites moving through the solar system at any given time, although most would be less than the newly opened object.
If true, it suggests that the online observatory of Vera S. Rubin in Chile may soon find these gloomy interstellar visitors every month, Norris said.
Moyl said it was not possible to send a mission to space to cross the new object.
However, these visitors offer scientists a rare chance to study something outside our solar system.
For example, if we find the ancestors of life as amino acids of such an object, it will give us “much more confidence that living conditions exist in other star systems,” Norris said.
DL-I/JGC