If you recall we recently had a visitor to the solar system that came from interstellar space. NASA and others released yesterday information on the SHAPE of the asteroid and to put it mildly, it is out of this world!
For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. The new results appear in the journal Nature on 20 November 2017.
For those of us who are sci-fi fans this is manna from heaven because the physical shape of Oumuamua conjures up the Monolith from '2001' and '2010', Rama from 'Rendezvous with Rama' - all Arthur C. Clarke creations.
To top it off we have yet to discover anything remotely resembling this asteroid in our own solar system. It is hard to imagine that we would not have detected a 400 meter long linear shaped asteroid.
Sky Guy in VA
good post
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading & your kind comment.
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