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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

What planets is it passing between?

It is inside jupiter's orbit now, it will come inside Mars for a time. It is almost on the plane of the solar system, not very inclined.

I linked an orbit viewer above if you want to look.

> It is almost on the plane of the solar system, not very inclined.

Is this also random chance or is there a reason why it's so close to the plane of the solar system?

It is also a factor of where our surveys look on the sky. A lot of asteroid surveys have biases to look at the plane of our solar system (since this is where a lot of asteroids are).

It is probably random chance, however there may be some biases from where they come from on the sky (I know people who work on that, but I don't know much about it).

N=3 does not provide very robust statistics yet, give us another decade or two.

We're going to see a lot more of these in the next couple of years due to the new Vera C Rubin observatory.

Also the ELT [1], I believe. (Both come online this year.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

ELT's first light is planned for March 2029.[1] Vera is already online I think.

[1] https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann25001/

I can't believe that all those super-intelligent astronomers, who spend hours on their own in the dark, couldn't come up with a better name than 'Extremely Large Telescope'. ;0)

I guess they should have SuperSized™ it.

At this point, it is tradition.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparis...

Not terribly related but I got curious, the ELT has a reported angular resolution of 0.005 arcseconds. The sad state of public trust has resulted in many people no longer accepting the US landed on the moon at all. Tossing the question of what it would take to resolve the lunar landing sites into a LLM gives a broad requirement of 0.0005 arcseconds. Even still, you could never "prove" it to most people unless it's glass the entire way with no "hoax generating" computers involved.

It's a fun idea thought though.

Good question, especially given the plane of our solar system is almost orthogonal to the greater plane of the Milky Way galaxy that contains us.

I would expect most visitors would come from the galactic plane.

Huh. It looks like on 10/2 it will make its closest pass to a planet, Mars, and on that date it also is in a straight line with Mars, Mercury and the sun, while Earth and Venus are roughly opposite each other. Do you know if this sim accounts for solar or martian gravity diverting its trajectory?

This orbit visualization uses a simple 2 body approximation, so only the sun. This is because unless an object has a VERY close approach to a planet the two body approximation is more then enough for this style of visualization.

I did a full proper n-body integration and it is not visually different than this.

> It is almost on the plane of the solar system, not very inclined.

except that it's going the wrong way :)

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