The Origin of Our First Interstellar Visitor | Space Time

Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! We were recently visited by a traveler from outside our solar system. This is the first time we’ve ever seen an object that came to us from interstellar space. It’s name is ‘Oumuamua. Check out http://curiositystream.com/spacetime

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In this Space Time Journal Club we look into the origins of ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid visiting us from beyond our solar system! We’ll focus on the results of:

“The origin of interstellar asteroidal objects like 1I/2017 U1”
Portegies Zwart, Pelupessy, Bedorf, Cai & Torres 2017
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03558

On October 19th this year astronomers spotted an object moving rapidly away from the sun. The discovery was made by Pan-STARRS – the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System: a group of telescopes that constantly monitor the sky for moving or variable objects like asteroids or comets, It was initially thought to be a new comet, but after 34 days of follow up observations and a bit of orbital mechanics, it became abundantly clear that we were looking at the first object ever observed that came from outside our solar system. The mysterious object has been dubbed 1I: the first object in a brand new International Astronomical Union class, with “I” standing for “interstellar”. 1I also scored a more poetic name: ‘Oumuamua, from the Hawaiian meaning “a messenger from afar arriving fast”.

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