A meter-wide asteroid collided with Earth’s atmosphere and exploded with light as it burned up near Nennhausen, Germany. Scientists at the SETI Institute forecasted the event, which is how the photographer caught the spectacle.
Since the dawn of the solar system, rocky visitors from deep space have blazed across Earth’s skies. But the question remains: when will the next interstellar object appear in our solar system?
An interstellar visitor, sometimes referred to as an interstellar object or interstellar interloper, is a natural astronomical object that originated outside the solar system and is observed passing through it on a trajectory that will carry it back into interstellar space.
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According to NASA, the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system, named ‘Oumuamua, was observed on Oct. 19, 2017 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope.
Observations suggest that this object, whose shape and size are unlike those seen in our system, had been floating through the Milky Way for hundreds of millions of years before encountering our star system, NASA said.
ʻOumuamua is the first confirmed interstellar object detected passing through our solar system.
(NASA)
“It’s a strange visitor from a faraway star system, shaped like nothing we’ve ever seen in our own solar system neighborhood,” said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory upon the discovery of the foreign object.
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The “visitor”, named after the Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”, is an elongated, rocky cigar-shaped object with a red hue that behaves more like a comet than an asteroid, though scientists still aren’t certain which it was — or whether it may have been some hybrid of the two.
ʻOumuamua was the first observed interstellar visitor to pass through our solar system. Let’s see what prediction markets are saying about if we will see a visitor before 2027.
While trading has varied, there have only been two observed interstellar visitors to our solar system.
Borisov, the first confirmed interstellar comet, was discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on Aug. 30, 2019, according to NASA.
Hubble took this image on Oct. 12, 2019, when comet 2I/Borisov was about 260 million miles from Earth.
(NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA) / NASA)
After its discovery, Borisov became a phenomenon discussed and examined by amateur and professional astronomers around the world. After a week of observations, scientists determined that the comet was visiting from outside our solar system.
“Whereas ‘Oumuamua appeared to be a rock, Borisov is really active, more like a normal comet. It’s a puzzle why these two are so different,” said David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, leader of the Hubble team that observed the comet.
Photographs of Borisov were captured on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as the roughly 3,200-foot comet in length across soared around 110,000 mph through the solar system.
Though neither object threatened Earth, NASA keeps a close watch on the countless objects moving through space. That means the next time an interstellar traveler swings through our solar system, astronomers will be ready to catch a glimpse.
