Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
earthsky.org
earthsky.org
https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlw...
It would be funny if it behaves "as expected" when in the range of our instruments, but not when it thinks we can't see it :)
I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
I'm not sure how the progress of institutional and amateur observations compare. Obviously the big guys benefit from the same technological advancement, but I don't know whether the fraction of new objects discovered by amateurs has been growing or not. I suspect the odds of the first interstellar object being found by an amateur were still pretty long.
That's how life works on Earth. If it _can_ live somewhere, it's probably already there. We think that's related to how it can survive and adapt, so it's reasonable to assume other life would be similar in that regard.
Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain any life, it should already be there.
I know it sounds weird. What if life never got there? Well, it had plenty of opportunity. The universe is old and lots of things happened in it already.
Maybe life is a late addition to the universe, and we're one of the first instances of it. Or maybe it's rare, and we're lucky. Both the "life is new" and "life is rare" ideas, however, paint a picture of Earth being a special case somehow. "We are a special case" is not a very satisfying answer though (from the scientific point of view).
How do you know it's not? Venus is a much more difficult place for us to analyze than say, Mars.
I was talking about your scenario of space-faring silicon-based life. If Venus can support this different life, then it should be already there.
It's hard enough to find signs of life similar to ours (something familiar, carbon, metabolism), so if there is some completely different life somewhere in the solar system, it's unlikely we would be able to recognize it at first glance. So unlikely, that is almost pointless to postulate its existence.
Therefore, our best shot is to look for life similar to ours (because we know its tells). I think that's where the idea of a habitability zone comes from. It's not excluding the possibility of life existing outside of the zone, it's just making it easier for us to look (because looking everywhere means considering things we can't possibly understand).
That idea has been slightly changed since we started to hypothesize life on moons like Europa and Enceladus though. They are outside the classical habitable zone, but they have other possible means for producing liquid water that don't rely on the heat of a close star (tidal friction and residual core heat).
I'm not sure why that warrants a flood of downvotes, especially increasing after your message called me out, but hey I guess that's HN now.
He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.
If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.
But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.
There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
"What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it.
That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and its walls unguarded.a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.
Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
Perfect and brutal.
But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.
I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?
I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.
And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").
He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability
Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.
Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.
It seems more likely that it'll act like a non intelligent hunk of rock going through some random trajectory.
It's less silly to declare you'll win the lottery. That has happened many times over - but we're yet to discover that can or has existed outside of Earth. While it's nearly impossible it hasn't happened several times over, it's so far impossible that we've encountered even the crumbiest excuse for life.
I assert that it is silly. We're not indigenous American happening upon European settlers. We're indigenous Americans wandering about the continent harassing mammoths, inventing stories of how it'll go when it happens.
By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object.
The Wow! signal could be just such an event.
Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.
What do you think the natural spectrum of the Wow signal was, for determining amount of blue shift? What resolution of spectral data do you think we have on it?
Even if this was a scanning beam I think we can assume it would take a lot of energy and so may be based on a simple scalable physical process. Using hydrogen to create it makes sense as it is low mass and can be replenished.
Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.
He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait.
It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.
He's convinced it's an essentially a local phenomenon. I look forward to how he spins this paper.
That's assuming you manage to avoid death from microplastics, climate change or AI-related societal collapse, etc.
Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards.
Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.
In the mid 1990s we’d only seen a handful of exoplanets. That they were basically everywhere we looked early on clued us in to their prevalence.
It is passing between two point in our night sky. I believe from a plane view, if you look at our universe from the perspective of it laying flat, it is my understanding the spin of our universe means that everything ends up within a flat plane, so in a 3 dimensional space, we have a limited Y axis. The other planets are spaced out across the X and Y axis, this is passing between or across two points.
Am I thinking of this right? I know very little about astronomy.
You may be thinking of our galaxy (the Milky Way) or even our solar system, which both rotate and as such are both somewhat flattened (the solar system much more so than the galaxy.)
But what’s happening here has little to do with that. If you imagine the closest distance that Earth gets to Mars as a yardstick, 3I/Atlas is about half that yardstick’s distance from Mars right now - much closer than Earth ever gets. It’s practically in Mars’ back yard.
It's in Mars' backyard, but was it, or will it also be in Jupiter's backyard? I couldn't understand that from the original post.
It seemed to me that it was just that our telescopes/cameras near Jupiter would be pointed in that direction.
It's about 0.43 AU from the comet at its nearest, whereas Earth will be pretty much on the opposite side of the Sun, making observations difficult from here.
Edit: Earth, Mars and Jupiter are in roughly 120 degrees from each other as seen from the Sun, with the Earth-Sun-Jupiter angle closing up fast and the E-S-M angle growing slightly slower. In about two months the E-S-M angle will be 180.
True, but if it were that would solve some problems in observations:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/4/3038/8090496?lo...
so that's the fastest (macro & reachable) thing ever - good luck sticking a flag on it
https://abc7.com/post/government-websites-displaying-message...
We're pretty much hosed.
Theres a LOT of people who work for the government that want to do a good job, and faithfully keep doing what they're paid to do. Administrations dont matter. The mission does. And that mission goes year by year.
Well, until now.
And the current administration calls those people “the deep state” and wants to get rid of them.
- overheard on Avi Loeb's radio telescope, but fortunately mis-translated.
It is hard to believe, but it means it’s been a fiery comet for billions of years, how is that possible that it havent burned up…
Joke explanation: a drifting vehicle is burning tires and leaving a cloud of smoke behind, like a comet.
Depending on its origin/history, it’s getting run over by a runaway train, or taking a sedate walk.
For possibly billions of years, it has simply been an inert lump of ice passing through the universe.
Just as an indicator of the speed and possible distances.