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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

I am truly surprise that we don't get more interstellar visitors into our solar system. It kind shows how small our solar system is, or other way, how big the universe is.

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There's a good chance these sorts of things are whizzing past us all the time, and we're just not detecting them.

I mean, we just discovered ten new moons of Jupiter this year: http://earthsky.org/space/10-new-moons-discovered-jupiter-1-...

And two the year prior, bringing the count to 12 since 2016, for a total of 79 moons around Jupiter.

How many moons are discovered per-year on average? Is there something about these recent ones that made it difficult to discover earlier, eg size?

We could have many more and not know. This one was seen because it came so close to the earth.

We have telescope technology to thank. The quality and the number of telescopes is constantly increasing. We don't just look in the sky any more, we watch the same spot over time and look for changes. We are seeing more spots, more time, and more changes. An investment in telescopes is an investment in physics.

I wouldn't be so sure we don't... Just because we don't see them with our 5 senses doesn't mean they are not here yet.

You do realize we're not limited to "our 5 senses" when studying the universe, right?

You're totally right. I actually didn't think of that, but just meant that maybe other forms of being could exist and manifest in dimensions we're not even looking at. Is that why my comment was downvoted?

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