Astronomers are excited after spotting an object speeding at 133,200 miles per hour (about 214,364 kilometres per hour), which is too fast to be from our solar system, CNN reported on Friday.
The interstellar object is believed to be a comet, which astronomers from the European Space Agency have officially named 31/ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System), and is the third celestial body from beyond our solar system ever observed in our universe, CNN added.
The first thing to note is that the object poses no threat to our planet, astronomers have assured. It will orbit at about 150 million miles (240 million kilometres) from our planet. The comet is currently about 416 million miles (670 million kilometres) away from the sun and will make its closest approach to our star around October 30 at a distance of 130 million miles (210 million kilometres), NASA said in a report on the interstellar object.
Too fast to be from our solar system
“The comet is moving at nearly 37 miles per second (60 kilometres per second) — or 133,200 miles per hour (about 214,364 kilometres per hour) — too fast to be a local object in our solar system,” said Teddy Kareta, an assistant professor at Villanova University near Philadelphia.
The comet’s speed and trajectory through our solar system are two strong indicators that it originated beyond our universe, said Gianluca Masi, astronomer and astrophysicist at the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy and founder and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project.
Masi has been making observations of the comet and will stream a live view of the object on the Virtual Telescope Project’s website beginning at 6 p.m. ET Thursday.
“Objects bound to the sun — denizens of our solar system — take paths around it that return to the same point,” Kareta wrote in an email. “The Earth’s orbit is mostly circular, Pluto’s orbit is a stretched oval, and many comets are very highly eccentric — their orbits are very long and narrow ellipses. This object’s path through the solar system is very nearly a straight line.”
Travelling for millions of years
Tracking the object’s orbit also reveals the path it has taken to reach our solar system, said Dr. Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center of Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“When we extrapolate its motion backwards in time we see that it originated from outside our Solar System,” Chodas wrote in an email to CNN. “It must have originated from another Solar System and probably has been travelling through interstellar space for millions of years until it happened to encounter our Solar System.”
The astronomers still do not know precisely where the object has come from, but Kareta said that, “as our understanding of the object’s orbit increases, we might be able to make some good guesses in a few months.” Further study could reveal whether comets look the same in other solar systems, Kareta added.
Why it’s crucial to study them
Studying interstellar objects is crucial to gaining a broader understanding of planets beyond our solar system and how those planets form, Kareta said.
“They’re comets and asteroids which formed around other stars — the building blocks of planets around those faraway stars, which got ejected into interstellar space, which we later find as they zip through our solar system,” Kareta said. “We want to measure everything we can about these objects to compare them to our local comets and asteroids.”
