How likely is it that a random object from outside the solar system would pass so closely by Mars and Jupiter?
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.
True, but if it were that would solve some problems in observations:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/4/3038/8090496?lo...
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.
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.
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.