I almost said, "don't look now, but we have an extrasolar interloper," but the whole idea is to look. Just not now.
Ok, let's start over.
The buzz in the astronomy community is that astronomers have found the third object passing through our solar system that is not from, or part of, our solar system. The interloper was first discovered on July 1st, as the intro text in this NASA JPL video says
The NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, first reported observations of comet 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025. Since the first report, additional observations from before the discovery were gathered from the archives of three ATLAS telescopes around the world and Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. These “pre-discovery” observations extend back to June 14. The fast-moving comet, which originated outside our solar system around a different star, was discovered as a tiny speck moving across the vastness of space. When discovered it was about 410 million miles (670 million kilometers) away from the Sun, within the orbit of Jupiter.
This is the third object determined to be from beyond our solar system that has been observed passing through our "neighborhood." Astronomers expect to find more with new tools designed to identify near-Earth objects.
The first of these was ʻOumuamuaʻ, discovered in 2017, when it was already moving away from the Sun. It was likely cigar-shaped, and astronomers could only speculate about its nature and age. A couple of years later, astronomers found another object, 2I/Borisov, that was determined to be a rogue comet passing through the Solar System.
Early on Wednesday, the European Space Agency confirmed that the object, tentatively known as A11pl3Z when it was first cataloged, did indeed have interstellar origins.
An engineer at the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, David Rankin, said recent estimates of the object's eccentricity are about 6. A purely circular orbit has an eccentricity value of 0, and anything above 1 is hyperbolic. Essentially, this is a very, very strong indication that A11pl3Z originated outside of the Solar System.
This visualization of the path of 3I-ATLAS shows it's on an essentially straight line path through the solar system; the bend is caused by the mass of the sun deflecting the path. It shows that at its closest to the sun, the comet is just inside Mars' orbit. Unfortunately, it appears that our planet will be on the opposite side of the Sun when the object makes its closest approach.
Projected path of the new interstellar object. Credit: Catalina Sky Survey
Getting back to the idea of looking but not right now, I'm going to keep an ear open for stories about this interloper. See if it develops a tail as it approaches the sun. I'm hopeful that it'll be worth watching with binoculars or a telescope, although that's not based on anything I've read so far.
Aaaannnd "it's a strong possibility" that it's an alien spacecraft according an article in the UK Daily Mail, citing the same so-called astronomer that has said this twice before. I may have this wrong; the dental work pain med ain't med-ing so my focus is a bit off.
ReplyDeleteYeah, how many times have you seen that Oumuamua was an alien spaceship.
DeleteAnd I had exactly the same effects from my surgery pain meds a few weeks ago. When plain old Tylenol outperforms prescription Tylenol with "enhancements", you know it's crap in that bottle.