Interesting astronomy news:
Astronomers have spotted some kind of outer space rock that's the
first visitor from outside of our solar system that they've ever
observed.
The discovery has set off a mad scramble to point
telescopes at this fast-moving object to try to learn as much as
possible before it zips out of sight.
"Now we finally have a sample of something from another solar system, and I think that's really neat, " says Karen Meech,
an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, "and
so you'd love to see if it looks like stuff in our solar system."
It's
long been assumed that an interstellar object like this one should be
out there, because giant planets in forming solar systems are thought to
toss out bits of space crud that haven't yet glommed into anything. But
this is the first time scientists have actually found one.
The
mysterious object is small — less than a quarter mile in diameter — and
seems to have come from the general direction of the constellation
Lyra, moving through interstellar space at 15.8 miles per second, or
56,880 miles per hour.
But there's no tension in this - it was spotted on the way out of the solar system, not on the way in (when we could all have speculated as to whether it was actually an alien spaceship):
"The orbit is very convincing. It is going so fast that it clearly came from outside the solar system," says Paul Chodas,
manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's whipping around the Sun,
it has already gone around the Sun, and it has actually gone past the
Earth on its way out."
1 comment:
Steve, You are off the planet!
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