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A New Visitor from Very Deep Space is now Rushing through our Solar System [1]
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Date: 2025-07-02
This story seems to be lighting up the astronomy sites right now. The third confirmed deep space object to be seen passing through our solar system, it was initially detected by the ATLAS sky survey on July 1 and given the preliminary designation A11pl3Z before being announced on BlueSky by astronomy student K Ly with the handle astrafoxen. From IFLScience:
In 2017, astronomers found something they had never seen before: an object passing through the Solar System with an orbit indicating it came from outside. Subsequently named 'Oumuamua, the visitor appears to have a composition and shape unlike anything we have seen, leading to discredited claims it was an alien spaceship. Two years later, Comet 2I/Borisov turned up and was found to be much more similar to Solar System comets, although its orbit clearly marked it as interstellar. We don’t yet have those sorts of details of the new object, provisionally named A11pl3Z, or even whether it is a comet or asteroid, but we know it is unlike the others in one important way: its orbit. … Orbits are measured by their eccentricity (e). Those bound to the gravity well of a larger object have e values between zero (perfectly circular) and fractionally below 1 (extremely elongated like long-period comets). An eccentricity greater than 1 means an object is a one-time visitor to the Solar System that won’t be back. 'Oumuamua had an eccentricity of 1.20, and initial estimates were somewhat lower, leading to some claims we’d just mismeasured an orbit that was a tiny bit below 1, and therefore not interstellar at all. Comets or asteroids with eccentricities of less than one can be thrown out of the Solar System by encounters with giant planets, so it also took a while to check 'Oumuamua hadn’t only been recently boosted to an e value greater than 1, after a lifetime spent orbiting the Sun. … A11pl3Z never left room for such doubt, its orbital eccentricity was initially thought to be more than 10, and is currently estimated to be above 6, Further change is possible, but it’s still more than double Borisov; we’re definitely seeing something unlike any previous visitor.
As indicated by the orbital diagram, this new object (with an estimated diameter of 20 km) will never come anywhere close to Earth as it passes through our solar neighborhood. Indeed, it won’t even get particularly close to the Sun, where its perihelion on Oct 23 is expected to be not much nearer than the orbit of Mars — and unfortunately for Earth-based observations, we’ll be on the opposite side of the Sun then. OTOH, by the time of its “closest” approach to Earth in December, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory (the world's most powerful optical telescope) should be fully online by then. Some additional details from the Daily Galaxy:
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