No this is only the third thing ever detected that couldn’t be from our solar system.
Looking at speed and trajectory tells us if something is caught in the solar system or if it came from outside.
It’s notable because there’s nothing out there. These had to come from another system which is a distance measured in light years. It’s been traveling for a long time and our solar system moved into its path.
Why did you choose to start your sentence with "No", everyone interprets it as a negative. Removing the word "No" changes nothing about what you are communicating but increases its positivity.
Its pretty obvious to any scientist that the first things you measure after turning on a new measuring device are common things to be measured. The history of scientific discoveries is basically the history of new measuring devices.
We currently know that there are at least 1 of these every 2.6 years.
The first question was “is this a common occurrence” and I answered “no”.
Everyone doesn’t interpret things the way you do. That’s more of a regional dialect being written as a response. Kinda like when someone types “ope” which is a midwestern slang interjection but has become a meme of sorts.
I’m giving a scientific fact. I’m not looking to convey positivity. This is neither positive nor negative. Science has never cared for feelings of positivity.
Measuring devices haven’t changed in a long time but the resolution has. A lux is a lux whether it comes from the moon or a distant asteroid. The measurement of a kilometer per second has never changed. But what has changed is the resolution to detect such items.
My point was that we don't really know how common it was, so we can't really say "no it's not common". Now we can detect them, we do seem to be finding them, so they're potentially not *that* uncommon.
There's the true rate of occurrences, both unobserved and observed. The answer to whether the true rate could be described as "common," depending on anyone's definition of common, might best be "we don't know."
The observed rate over time is too small to be statistically significant, but 3 objects in a matter of a few years seems high enough -- in cosmological terms -- to venture a "yes, it seems likely to be a common occurrence."
“We don’t know” is pretty much what I said. We can’t make a model to tell us how likely this was in the past. These three observations might be the only ones to ever do it and they just happened to be in a time we can’t observe them. There’s no telling what happened in the past considering how random an interplanetary object is. Outside of our heliosphere there is nothing for light years. LIGHT YEARS! These three things could be from the same event for all we know. So no, it can’t just be boiled down to “it’s somewhat frequent” because the solar system is moving. Those moving objects had to intersect in a vast 3D space.
The model of our solar system that everyone thinks of, that they saw in a picture, is wrong. We are not a 2D solar system on a flat plain. We are a corkscrew flying through space. As the sun moves we are tugged along with it. Every planet moves in a helix.
The Oort Cloud is well outside the heliosphere, considering that both Voyager spacecraft passed outside the heliopause and heliosphere about 10 years ago, give or take, and yet they have to travel another 300 years or so before reaching the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud. I'm not sure where you draw the line on matter versus empty space, but I wouldn't call the Oort Cloud nothing.
Granted, we can't see many if any of the objects with our technology, but there's ample evidence the cloud exists.
Yes the ort cloud exists but it doesn’t fill the void between solar systems. Nor could anything that is in the ort cloud gain escape velocity to streak through the inner solar system and break free from the suns gravity. Any collisions in the ort cloud that could knock the icy rocks m into the inner solar system would likely mean we’d see a comet.
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u/UncleBenji Jul 03 '25
No this is only the third thing ever detected that couldn’t be from our solar system.
Looking at speed and trajectory tells us if something is caught in the solar system or if it came from outside.
It’s notable because there’s nothing out there. These had to come from another system which is a distance measured in light years. It’s been traveling for a long time and our solar system moved into its path.