> Some of the sensors that detect fireballs are operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, which uses the same technologies to monitor the skies for nuclear detonations. As a result, Siraj and Loeb couldn’t directly confirm the margin of error on the fireball’s velocity.
I absolutely love being alive right now. A Higgs boson! Confirmed objects from outside our solar system! A real life picture of a black hole! We’re just at the start of being able to learn these things, and it’s getting better by the year. I love it.
Conspiracy answer:
The alien probe launched 10,000 years ago just determined that either:
1) Our atmosphere is sufficiently thick to cause the object to disintegrate over seconds instead of instantaneously, meaning there’s enough raw gaseous material to be interesting, or
2) We have an active defense system, meaning the local inhabitants are smart enough to be interesting.
In 46 years, when the light reaches its origin around 26 Draconis, observations will be recorded, reports will be filed, and plans will be made.
It especially reminds me of the Grebulons from the final^H^H^H^H^Hfifth book in the series, whose ships computer was damaged in transit, corrupting the mission directive and the memories of the crew. All they could figure out was that they should monitor the earth from a safe distance, so they set up a base on the tenth planet Rupert and watched earth TV all day.
Yes, the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately-named Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy.
The 'final' was meant as a sly dig at Eoin Colfer's addition to the series, "And Another Thing", which attempted to wrap up the story after Adams' death. I read it shortly after release and didn't give it a fair chance.
Could you imagine trying to aim something at a moving planet from light years away and while also shooting it at that speed and not having potential a huge number of things affect it's trajectory via gravity? I love the conspiracy theory, but unless it could course-correct during flight, the odds seem insanely low for it to be a alien test probe
If I was an alien engineer trying to aim something at a moving planet light years away while also shooting it at that speed and having a huge number of things affect it's trajectory via gravity, I'd make it course-correct during flight.
You can go a step further. Use a computer vision algorithm to find planets, and then do some spectroscopy to identify planets with water in their atmosphere. Course correct to aim at one of those planets
It was no disintegration at all, merely a thermochemical nanomultiplication catalyst that relied on aerobreaking to generate 10^14 quantum entangled shards of spy drones. These are now permeating all multi-celled organisms, which they have adapted as co-processors. They rely on quantum-entanglement synchronized gravitational wave induction for home-world communication, but can fall back to planet-wide baseline interferometry due to the entangled nature of their origin.
This is the plot of the Expanse books. Ancient alien civilization loads a rock with nano-computers that take over self-replicating molecules on planets with life to build stuff, aim it at Earth two billion years ago, but it never makes it because Saturn captures it and it becomes the moon Phoebe instead.
Dunno, there's helpful photons traveling from distant points through out stellar neighborhood and to any possible observer. We are already making 3D gravitation maps of our neighborhood. Also who says there's not some minor navigational control, much like today's smart bombs. Even minor corrections made well ahead of time could greatly help the aim.
Not to mention if you are slinging probes into other solar systems you likely could send 1000x into each one, so if a few miss, not big deal.
Sending probes is dangerous. You never know who is going to capture it and figure out where it was sent from. Conclusion: make deniable self-destructing probes.
1. Send probe to star system slow enough to be random interstellar rock on a collision course with planetary body,
2. it collects data as it approaches body,
3. then have it self-destruct in the atmo destroying all technology and information in the probe. Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
Conservation of energy is pretty fundamental. If we can't rely on that, then there's no point assuming anything at all, certainly not alien intentions.
i would imagine intentions could be derived from resource scarcity or abundance.
If aliens intend to invade over resources, the cost of such an invasion (from an energy consumption perspective) is so prohibitively high, that harvesting from a closer body seems way more feasible.
If aliens intend to invade over not resources, but some other factor, then we cannot guess it. May be there's what amounts to religion and the invasion is a defacto purging or converting of alien species over to their "god". Or to exterminate any possible future competition (aka, darwinianism at the galactic scale).
How can you assume resources scarcity if energy isn't conserved? At this point all bets are off.
How do we know that traveling closer in the same time takes less energy than traveling further? We can't assume that anymore.
And so on. This is my problem with most sci-fi. They take some crazy assumptions and ignore most of the consequences so the world is recognizable.
This is like people in ancient Greece hearing that one city in 21st century has more population than the whole world in their time and wondering how we feed our horses :)
Dunno, take say 1 gram of matter and convert it to energy. Then assume something 100x better than the JWST, add in a few more decades of signal processing, encoding, etc. Add in the possibility of receiving from more than a single solar system.
After all some random ham in 2005 set a record of 13M miles per watt. That's in 2005, with an standard radio (elecraft k1) and not any exotic receivers like say something 100-1000x better than the JWST that's I'd expect earth to have over the next few decades, let alone some other civilization that's sending sensors to likely millions of solar systems if they found us.
That's only 400kw for a light year, not that much assuming you are slinging sensors into other solar systems.
Well, the energy requirements for wireless communication go up with the distance squared. So even if you can transmit 13 million miles per watt, that's equivalent to about 200GW for 1 light year.
> Sending probes is dangerous. You never know who is going to capture it and figure out where it was sent from.
I'm not sure capture would necessarily be all that likely. Assuming a flyby and not a crash, capturing a probe would require the captor to accelerate to the probe's relative velocity first. If you wanted to bring it back, too, you'd then have to decelerate back into a non-escape velocity with the captive in tow.
Alternatively, you'd need some way of slowing the probe down without touching it, e.g. with light, but doing that would take a rather long time, especially if it wasn't designed as a light sail intended to be slowed down and you don't want to destroy the probe in the process.
Both sound quite nontrivial especially if the probe is travelling at a speed that would be useful for interstellar travel, and if you don't detect the probe a lot in advance, which also sounds nontrivial. If the target world had reached such an advanced technology level that the probe could be detected and deemed interesting early on and captured, all bets would be off anyway.
> Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
> I'm not sure capture would necessarily be all that likely. Assuming a flyby and not a crash, capturing a probe would require the captor to accelerate to the probe's relative velocity first. If you wanted to bring it back, too, you'd then have to decelerate back into a non-escape velocity with the captive in tow.
This is a really good point. If you can make your probe fast enough you reduce warning time and make it very expensive to catch.
> Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
I was assuming a signal that could not be distinguished from an explosion much like how cryptography can encrypt a message that without the key can not be distinguished from random noise.
If one wanted to get really deniable about this you could just design a rock such that its shape and composition would reveal facts about the planets atmosphere based purely on how it explodes, e.g. the wave lengths of the light of an explosion vary based on oxygen content. If the rock doesn't explode on schedule you could conclude with some probability intelligent life intercepted it for study.
A civilization advanced enough to launch interstellar probes and make plans on a 20k year timescale (10k years for the probe to get here, 10k years for them to get here) has no use whatsoever for the paltry resources in our solar system. Instead they could just harvest them from nearby systems or “empty” space.
Perhaps they advance very, very slowly as a species, but it’s been a billion years since their technological revolution. They’re wondering how we got from AM radio to satellite communications in less than a century, and awfully worried about it.
That's an interesting point. Although if they were that advanced, they'd realize their slowness means they wouldn't get an answer quickly enough to do anything about it.
Sadly the Draconis civilization was obliterated 10 years ago, by a Supernova way too close to their planetary system. Lucky Earth Inners dodge another cosmic bullet.
The paper estimates objects of these size should hit Earth at least once per decade. The database goes back to 1988 so there might even be one or two others in there waiting to be detected.
Unfortunately, this is like Britain coast length in 1700s - constantly increased, few years more than 100% increase, because of development of science and technologies.
And most such objects appear above equatorial locations (because originated from Galaxy plane), where not much science institutions exists.
Wow that’s actually incredible. The first confirmed interstellar object impacted earths atmosphere? Really shows how far tech must have come in detecting these events in the last 20 years or so.
Also the coincidence of it impacting earth and not Jupiter or any other planetary body or just wizzing by is blowing my mind. Of course we have more sensors around earth so that makes sense but still. I would have thought we would’ve seen something similar to Oumououa prior to this.
Geologist didn't have many sensors for locating earthquakes, but then several governments became very interested in tracking any nuclear testing and those sames sensors are quite good at tracking earthquakes. So much so that earthquakes can now be tracked in 3D anywhere on the planet, even enough to identify the shape and thickness of the various continental plates.
> The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h)
Can anyone say what percentage of the speed of light that is?
The interesting aspect is "interstellar" (=from outside the solar system) instead of just "interplanetary", which would imply an origin within the solar system.
Interplanetary only need to have 2nd cosmic speed (just slightly about 11km/s), but interstellar must be 3rd cosmic speed, (at Earth much faster than 42km/s).
Meteorites from our solar system hit the Earth around 20-30km/h
This extrasolar thing hit the Earth at 200km/h+.
Remember that the kinetic energy formula = 0.5 * m * v²
Is the velocity squared that means something very small can still wipe out an entire city in a gigantic fireball with little to no warning and ability to do anything about it. This is a very big deal for the people looking at things like asteroid defense at civilization time scales.
Can they? I'd think even with the faster speed you'd still need to be decently big to avoid getting turned into various exciting forms of gas when hitting the atmosphere. I mean of course you don't have to be _as_ big, but is it like an order of magnitude difference?
Interestingly, the database contains two other objects detected with impact speeds of more than 40km/s including one from 2015-07-04 which an even greater speed than this interstellar asteroid. I wonder why these are not also considered to have interstellar origin? Is it because they were accelerated by the sun before colliding with the Earth? The original paper does not mention whether or not they considered the origins of any other objects from the database.
Direction of travel can make a big difference. If it impacts one side of the earth, the leading side in the earths orbit around the sun, then you need to subtract the earth's orbital velocity. On the opposite side, you need to add earth's velocity to get a true representation of the object's speed around the sun. The earth is also spinning. The atmosphere is moving at basically the same speed as earth's rotation. That too has to be accommodated based on the direction and latitude of the impact.
Lastly, something that this paper doesn't address. There is a chance that the object was local to our solar system but had been 'flung' out onto an escape trajectory. Our solar system is a giant multi-body problem. Things can be flung out into space. This rock might have been accelerated to escape velocity by our moon or some other body. So rather than an interstellar object, it may have been a local rock on its way out that just happened to hit earth before leaving the solar system.
Good point about the relative speed of the earth. That could probably explain why the other objects turn out to be more ordinary.
As for the idea that this 2014 object originated in our solar system: I don't think that's possible. They were able to project it's incoming trajectory and there were no significant masses that could have directed it path from anywhere other than interstellar space. This is pretty clear from the paper.
So the fact that they release this now means that they have an even better detection and tracking mechanism? Or do they just want others to believe that?
This info is classified by default usually. And the memo reads as if astrophysicists were asking the government to confirm or deny this specific bit of info for their research.
The solar system is huge, and earth is really really tiny. For this to have happened means that it is likely to happen again, which suggests that there is a large amount of crap out there blazing through interstellar space, any sufficiently large piece of which could be a civilization-ending projectile.
We need better detection and defenses. And another planet. ASAP.
The fact that an interstellar object happened by chance to intersect the earth implies that there are millions of such objects flying through the solar system. Most of them probably fly through and are never seen again. We really need to get better at space operations, so we can either catch one of these objects for further study, or at least figure out a way to build a probe that could follow it out of the system.
>The possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material[...]
It's very likely that there's interstellar material already on earth from before we were able to detect the impact though, right? Question for the astrophysicists, is there something in the composition of objects that can tell us if something is interstellar in origin?
I'm not an astrophysicist, but from what I can gather we want these potential shards off the sea floor for analysis precisely because we're not sure what the makeup of interstellar debris would look like. It would be hard to form a criteria for suspected extrasolar material with such little data at this point.
> is there something in the composition of objects that can tell us if something is interstellar in origin?
Share of isotopes.
- Isotopic analyze at Earth begins countdown from Sun system events, but events on other stars have other timeline and their star also will have other share.
Sun is not rare star, but our neighbors stars mostly different.
Plus, some of material appear from Novas and Supernovas (it is very like fingerprint of nuke - highly depend on technology available at place where it built and from raw materials from which it built), and it will also be different for thing traveled from other star.
Only problem, is that large part of this technology is classified, so scientists will have problems on every step, and some things will be opened to all only in few decades.
106 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] thread> Some of the sensors that detect fireballs are operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, which uses the same technologies to monitor the skies for nuclear detonations. As a result, Siraj and Loeb couldn’t directly confirm the margin of error on the fireball’s velocity.
So a bit too small to hold baby Kal-El.
https://superfriends.fandom.com/wiki/Superbaby
I absolutely love being alive right now. A Higgs boson! Confirmed objects from outside our solar system! A real life picture of a black hole! We’re just at the start of being able to learn these things, and it’s getting better by the year. I love it.
Conspiracy answer:
The alien probe launched 10,000 years ago just determined that either:
1) Our atmosphere is sufficiently thick to cause the object to disintegrate over seconds instead of instantaneously, meaning there’s enough raw gaseous material to be interesting, or
2) We have an active defense system, meaning the local inhabitants are smart enough to be interesting.
In 46 years, when the light reaches its origin around 26 Draconis, observations will be recorded, reports will be filed, and plans will be made.
This gives me Douglas Adams vibes, thinking about an alien species posting plans to invade Earth. "The plans were on display for months" [1]
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...
“Should we report this?”
“You really want to do all that paperwork?”
“Bulldozer it is.”
The 'final' was meant as a sly dig at Eoin Colfer's addition to the series, "And Another Thing", which attempted to wrap up the story after Adams' death. I read it shortly after release and didn't give it a fair chance.
This quote is about planning an interstellar invasion: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5942504-the-mighty-ships-to...
Also:
- The ion thrusters were small enough to completely disintegrate on impact/reentry.
- Oumuamua was the mother ship, clearly.
Oumuamua was the mass ejected to decelerate.
Mother ship due in 10-20 years.
Not to mention if you are slinging probes into other solar systems you likely could send 1000x into each one, so if a few miss, not big deal.
1. Send probe to star system slow enough to be random interstellar rock on a collision course with planetary body,
2. it collects data as it approaches body,
3. then have it self-destruct in the atmo destroying all technology and information in the probe. Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
If aliens intend to invade over resources, the cost of such an invasion (from an energy consumption perspective) is so prohibitively high, that harvesting from a closer body seems way more feasible.
If aliens intend to invade over not resources, but some other factor, then we cannot guess it. May be there's what amounts to religion and the invasion is a defacto purging or converting of alien species over to their "god". Or to exterminate any possible future competition (aka, darwinianism at the galactic scale).
How do we know that traveling closer in the same time takes less energy than traveling further? We can't assume that anymore.
And so on. This is my problem with most sci-fi. They take some crazy assumptions and ignore most of the consequences so the world is recognizable.
This is like people in ancient Greece hearing that one city in 21st century has more population than the whole world in their time and wondering how we feed our horses :)
After all some random ham in 2005 set a record of 13M miles per watt. That's in 2005, with an standard radio (elecraft k1) and not any exotic receivers like say something 100-1000x better than the JWST that's I'd expect earth to have over the next few decades, let alone some other civilization that's sending sensors to likely millions of solar systems if they found us.
That's only 400kw for a light year, not that much assuming you are slinging sensors into other solar systems.
You can focus more of that power into a particular area, but the fundamentals here are not particularly negotiable.
I'm not sure capture would necessarily be all that likely. Assuming a flyby and not a crash, capturing a probe would require the captor to accelerate to the probe's relative velocity first. If you wanted to bring it back, too, you'd then have to decelerate back into a non-escape velocity with the captive in tow.
Alternatively, you'd need some way of slowing the probe down without touching it, e.g. with light, but doing that would take a rather long time, especially if it wasn't designed as a light sail intended to be slowed down and you don't want to destroy the probe in the process.
Both sound quite nontrivial especially if the probe is travelling at a speed that would be useful for interstellar travel, and if you don't detect the probe a lot in advance, which also sounds nontrivial. If the target world had reached such an advanced technology level that the probe could be detected and deemed interesting early on and captured, all bets would be off anyway.
> Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
This is a really good point. If you can make your probe fast enough you reduce warning time and make it very expensive to catch.
> Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
I was assuming a signal that could not be distinguished from an explosion much like how cryptography can encrypt a message that without the key can not be distinguished from random noise.
If one wanted to get really deniable about this you could just design a rock such that its shape and composition would reveal facts about the planets atmosphere based purely on how it explodes, e.g. the wave lengths of the light of an explosion vary based on oxygen content. If the rock doesn't explode on schedule you could conclude with some probability intelligent life intercepted it for study.
And most such objects appear above equatorial locations (because originated from Galaxy plane), where not much science institutions exists.
Also the coincidence of it impacting earth and not Jupiter or any other planetary body or just wizzing by is blowing my mind. Of course we have more sensors around earth so that makes sense but still. I would have thought we would’ve seen something similar to Oumououa prior to this.
That's mostly just because we don't notice 1.5ft wide rocks in space unless they do something interesting like hit our atmosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
Can anyone say what percentage of the speed of light that is?
Speed of light: 670,616,629mph
= 0.00019385144% the speed of light
Stuff from outside is a lot rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape...
BTW interesting, that on some places in Sun system, difference of 2nd and 3rd speeds is much less.
This extrasolar thing hit the Earth at 200km/h+.
Remember that the kinetic energy formula = 0.5 * m * v²
Is the velocity squared that means something very small can still wipe out an entire city in a gigantic fireball with little to no warning and ability to do anything about it. This is a very big deal for the people looking at things like asteroid defense at civilization time scales.
Yes, exactly.
On Russian astronomy forums where discussion, in which decided, such thing could be planetary scale weapon.
That's why many smart people think, that tries to contact extraterrestrial civilizations are extremely dangerous for humanity.
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/
Lastly, something that this paper doesn't address. There is a chance that the object was local to our solar system but had been 'flung' out onto an escape trajectory. Our solar system is a giant multi-body problem. Things can be flung out into space. This rock might have been accelerated to escape velocity by our moon or some other body. So rather than an interstellar object, it may have been a local rock on its way out that just happened to hit earth before leaving the solar system.
As for the idea that this 2014 object originated in our solar system: I don't think that's possible. They were able to project it's incoming trajectory and there were no significant masses that could have directed it path from anywhere other than interstellar space. This is pretty clear from the paper.
We need better detection and defenses. And another planet. ASAP.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1990341307040013
What is still bloody incredible. That would be a rotation around planet Earth every 2,2 minutes. Or make it to the Moon in 21 minutes.
It's very likely that there's interstellar material already on earth from before we were able to detect the impact though, right? Question for the astrophysicists, is there something in the composition of objects that can tell us if something is interstellar in origin?
Share of isotopes.
- Isotopic analyze at Earth begins countdown from Sun system events, but events on other stars have other timeline and their star also will have other share.
Sun is not rare star, but our neighbors stars mostly different.
Plus, some of material appear from Novas and Supernovas (it is very like fingerprint of nuke - highly depend on technology available at place where it built and from raw materials from which it built), and it will also be different for thing traveled from other star.
Only problem, is that large part of this technology is classified, so scientists will have problems on every step, and some things will be opened to all only in few decades.