[HN Gopher] Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
___________________________________________________________________
Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
Author : jandrewrogers
Score : 176 points
Date : 2025-10-03 20:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (earthsky.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (earthsky.org)
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Was it glowing green?
| ares623 wrote:
| Ulaaaaa!
| suprnurd wrote:
| Looking forward to seeing what images they received, especially
| after Avi Loeb's comments on it.
| ares623 wrote:
| Avi's the new "it's Aliens" meme guy
| zikzak wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| He _was_ well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind
| too far and it falls out of the cranium.
| zikzak wrote:
| 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?
| ares623 wrote:
| Didn't Galileo collect evidence first?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| alganet wrote:
| "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.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| Space agencies are already pointing every single
| instrument they can at this thing.
| exe34 wrote:
| I bet the aliens are having an annual picnic in the
| opposite direction!
| all2 wrote:
| There's an excellent quote from the WH40k universe:
| An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred
| and its walls unguarded.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| ares623 wrote:
| 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.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| One of my other favorite piece of media is the intro of a
| Rick and Morty episode parodying the plot of contact.
| Highly recommended.
| ares623 wrote:
| I missed that. I'll have to look it up.
| philbo wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "What if" is just fine.
|
| Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
| philbo wrote:
| 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
| phyzome wrote:
| Last I checked, he was making claims well beyond that.
| xorbax wrote:
| "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
| bsdetector wrote:
| 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.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| Fwiw, Avi's hypothesis for Oumuamua was not that it was
| functioning, but that it was old, defunct light sail.
| 827a wrote:
| Well, you know what they say; don't be so open-minded that
| your brain falls out.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Nonsense. Open minded means not precluding possibilities
| based on irrational bias, which would only increases
| intelligence.
| 827a wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| efavdb wrote:
| Here's an interview of his on this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0xB3EtQX0
| Perenti wrote:
| 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.
| dostick wrote:
| > 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...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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.
| motoboi wrote:
| 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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| mrexroad wrote:
| 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.
| wasting_time wrote:
| This object is "moving" at roughly 58 km/s. It's doing a
| leisurely Sunday drive and getting overtaken by someone
| 3x their speed.
| longos wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| Wind in a vacuum, that's interesting.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| mrexroad wrote:
| > "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."
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Comets don't do anything much until they get close to a star.
| TMWNN wrote:
| 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/>
| dweekly wrote:
| 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?
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| exitb wrote:
| 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.
| philbo wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| Razengan wrote:
| > _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 :)
| philbo wrote:
| Every confirmation is a data point.
| pengaru wrote:
| 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...
| Marsk wrote:
| 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."
| preisschild wrote:
| at least it's not saying "thanks to the radical left democrats"
| like other govt websites
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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...
| svachalek wrote:
| https://www.hud.gov/
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Good lord. That's worse than I'd heard.
|
| We're pretty much hosed.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Some departments have even added similar language to
| employees' e-mail out-of-office messages.
| mystraline wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| > 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| So far left, they are actually far right
| dnw wrote:
| 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.
| bravoetch wrote:
| From wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have
| been discovered traveling through the Solar System:
| 1I/`Oumuamua 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.
| eugenekay wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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/`Oumuamua), 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.
| coolspot wrote:
| 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.
| zeven7 wrote:
| That's interesting. If it was possible to do on a homemade
| telescope, then why were no interstellar objects discovered
| before 1A?
| MalbertKerman wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| A funny overview of the recent history
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| 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).
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain
| any life, it should already be there.
|
| How do you know it's not? Venus is a much more difficult
| place for us to analyze than say, Mars.
| alganet wrote:
| Maybe it is, I don't know.
|
| I was talking about your scenario of space-faring
| silicon-based life. If Venus can support this different
| life, then it should be already there.
|
| It's hard enough to find signs of life similar to ours
| (something familiar, carbon, metabolism), so if there is
| some completely different life somewhere in the solar
| system, it's unlikely we would be able to recognize it at
| first glance. So unlikely, that is almost pointless to
| postulate its existence.
|
| Therefore, our best shot is to look for life similar to
| ours (because we know its tells). I think that's where
| the idea of a habitability zone comes from. It's not
| excluding the possibility of life existing outside of the
| zone, it's just making it easier for us to look (because
| looking everywhere means considering things we can't
| possibly understand).
|
| That idea has been slightly changed since we started to
| hypothesize life on moons like Europa and Enceladus
| though. They are outside the classical habitable zone,
| but they have other possible means for producing liquid
| water that don't rely on the heat of a close star (tidal
| friction and residual core heat).
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| zeven7 wrote:
| 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| "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.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| How likely is it that a random object from outside the solar
| system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Pretty likely if there are a lot of them!
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| 827a wrote:
| In fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its
| name.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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!)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, like exoplanets. When I was in middle school there
| were none. Now there's 6,000 confirmed ones.
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I'm curious how unlikely it is. Seems very, very unlikely
| to pass by 2 major planets.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It is. It's similarly unlikely that I win the lottery.
| But someone always does!
| baggy_trough wrote:
| The situations are in no way analogous.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure they are. There are likely trillions of these
| things. We are likely gonna see them everywhere. Like
| scratch-off lottery cards.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| We have seen 3.
| PoorlyNamed wrote:
| Any path it could possibly take is equally unlikely.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Aliens have been doing this every few years for 250,000 years
| but we've just only managed to build barely decent telescopes
| ;)
| downrightmike wrote:
| I wonder if we are going through a debris cloud and these are
| just the first small objects.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I find this to be an interesting thought.
| codr7 wrote:
| This one is anything but small.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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.
| lrasinen wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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?l
| o...
| lazide wrote:
| Any object not doing so is very unlikely to be seen by us.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Why so?
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I don't know if that applies to the sky surveys.
| lazide wrote:
| 1) they are new 2) they are still limited in coverage
| area (https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/FinderCh
| art/docs/...)
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| zero. It must be the Borg after the time jump.
| giardini wrote:
| "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.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| And NASA shutdown
| freen wrote:
| Don't Look Up!
| modzu wrote:
| the thought of this frozen rock drifting through space for
| billions of years fills me with existential dread :(
| mrexroad wrote:
| 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.
| stouset wrote:
| Wait until you hear what Earth has been up to in that same
| time.
| komali2 wrote:
| 80 years (if lucky) is an unfathomably cruel prank and a
| prison.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| 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.
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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!
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Now think about how "lucky" this one is it got to float through
| a solar system.
| rd07 wrote:
| 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.
| wbl wrote:
| Why don't we have an interceptor ready to go for the next one?
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| 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
| wbl wrote:
| A flyby is fine, and I'm willing to explore some 1960's
| propulsion solutions.
| librasteve wrote:
| > 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
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