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Yeah but then it wouldn’t be drifting would it?

Joke explanation: a drifting vehicle is burning tires and leaving a cloud of smoke behind, like a comet.

Whether it's drifting through space or hammering through at dozens of kilometres a second is rather a matter of perspective. Perhaps as far as it's concerned, its sedate drift has been interrupted by a very ill-mannered solar system making a reckless close pass.

Yes, the solar system is moving (rotating) relative to the galactic core at 230 KM/s, far faster than this object is moving relative to us.

Depending on its origin/history, it’s getting run over by a runaway train, or taking a sedate walk.

Tangentially, I enjoy reminding my kids how long it takes our star to complete a rotation around the Milky Way, and then also point out that we can go to a museum and see fossils of what life looked like one galactic rotation ago. It gives the right amount of backward and forward perspective about the rock we live on that I want them to keep tucked away in the corner of their mind.

This object is "moving" at roughly 58 km/s. It's doing a leisurely Sunday drive and getting overtaken by someone 3x their speed.

Hopefully our solar system isn't making a reckless pass into the path of the fragments from a historic explosion and we're just seeing the first few.

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