Tuesday, October 31, 2017

An Interstellar Visitor

Astronomers have long speculated that debris from exoplanet formation could be ejected from another solar system but nothing so far has been observed (if we ignore the domestic molecules formed from elements created by supernova and kilonova explosions). On October 19 an unusual small object designated A/2017 was detected by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii by a postdoctoral fellow, Rob Weryk, while searching for near earth objects for NASA. The motion of this body could not be explained as a normal asteroid or comet since it did not follow the normal orbits of near-earth objects but was on a hyperbolic trajectory crossing the ecliptic (plane of the planets) inside Mercury’s orbit and then made a hairpin turn due to the gravity of the sun under the earth’s orbit at the rapid speed of 27 miles/sec. Weryk and Karen Meech, an astronomer who studies small bodies possibly involved in solar system formation, both realized that this object probably came from another solar system around another star. Davide Farnocchia and Matt Holman,  scientists at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also concluded that the evidence suggested an interstellar origin!!! A graph of the orbit is shown in the following  UTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBYrFJoL2E.

If this is true, this asteroid must have spent millions  if not billions of years traveling from another solar system to the earth. I find this discovery fantastic and exciting.

An astronomer friend of mine, Ben Zuckerman, reminded me that this type  of astronomical phenomenon makes the suggestion  of "panspermia" or "lithopanspermia" - that life arrived on earth from other planets or even from exoplanets in other solar systems - in the realm of possibility.

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