On October 2017, a mysterious object detected approaching our solar system near the sun. This unusual object - for now designated A/2017 U1 - is less than a quarter-mile (400 meters) in diameter and is moving remarkably fast. “The exciting thing about this is that this may be essentially a visitor from another star system,” said Dr Edward Bloomer, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. If its origins are confirmed as lying beyond our solar system, it will be the first space rock known to come from elsewhere in the galaxy.
A/2017 U1 was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, during the course of its nightly search for near-Earth objects for NASA. Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), was first to identify the moving object and submit it to the Minor Planet Center.
A/2017 U1 was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, during the course of its nightly search for near-Earth objects for NASA. Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), was first to identify the moving object and submit it to the Minor Planet Center.
According to observations made by astronomers, the mysterious object entered our solar system from above, passing just inside Mercury’s orbit and travelling below the sun, before turning and heading back up through the plane of the solar system towards the stars beyond. At its closest, on 9 September, the object was 23.4m miles from the sun. This object is several hundred feet across and is currently speeding away from us at more than 98,000 miles an hour. At that speed, the space rock is moving fast enough to outrun the sun’s gravitational tug—implying that it was never part of our solar system to begin with.
Weryk immediately realized this was an unusual object. "Its motion could not be explained using either a normal solar system asteroid or comet orbit," he said. Weryk contacted IfA graduate Marco Micheli, who had the same realization using his own follow-up images taken at the European Space Agency's telescope on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But with the combined data, everything made sense. Said Weryk, "This object came from outside our solar system."
"This is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen," said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back."
Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/small-asteroid-or-comet-visits-from-beyond-the-solar-system
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/interstellar/
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/interstellar-solar-system-asteroid-comet-space-science/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/27/mysterious-object-detected-speeding-past-the-sun-could-be-from-another-solar-system-a2017-u1
Pic Source:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/a2017_u1_v2a.jpg
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