the ∆v makes a sample return mission from an interstellar object currently impossible.
3l atlas is doing 63kilometers/second and anything even going whatever the minimum speed to qualify as interstellar will be goiing to fast to catch up to, and then have enough fuel to brake for a gravitational capture by the sun.
our best chance to learn about interstellar objects is to blast them with ultra high powered laser beams and use telescopes to do remote spectrographic and visual analysis , this could likely be cobbled together right now.
we can do much more with direct laser strikes, a laser will be able to blast through the dust and gass corona, if there was radar directed at the same time for precise timing and targeting.
size, velocity, shape, and details of its shape, and composition in many areas and reach below the imediate surface
we cant catch it, but we can certainly get a much better look
An article said this is the 3rd interstellar object detected. Are we detecting more interstellar visitors because they are getting more common, or have our techniques improved over the last few years?
Entirely the second. When Vera Rubin starts reporting its regular scans this will be made very clear because we'll probably find 10+ interstellar objects per year at minimum.
These things are only a mile or two wide and at the distance of Jupiter. They require extremely sensitive and high-resolution telescopes to detect. There are probably many more of them that are smaller and further.
> We report detection of CN emission and also detect numerous Ni I lines while Fe I remains undetected, potentially implying efficiently released gas-phase Ni.
Where does it say there is zero iron? This is an upper bound, not zero.
I doubt they're serious but some wackos thought Oumuamua was an alien probe due to its unusual shape, and since this new interstellar object is arriving shortly after Oumuamua has left it must be the mothership.
I feel like it's more of a meme than a serious thing for most people.
I am getting bombarded with yt videos about this object being half the size of the sun passing our system with the planets aligned in a 0.01% chance perfect geometry etc etc. millions of views. It's incredible what people believe these days. Not a grain of skepticism.
I think the number of wacky believers hasn't changed that much. It's just that now the countless outlets and algorithms venting this nonsense have ballooned to galactic proportions! My dad used to buy these 70/80s UFO magazines back in the day and they were just as nutty.
Do all of the views necessarily translate 1:1 to the number of people that believe it? Some people watch just to see what kooky nonsense people are falling for.
There are many more rocks in our own solar system than there are interstellar spacecraft. Assuming similar proportions elsewhere makes us conclude it’s never aliens.
I didn't hate the rest. it gave me an interest in robots and nanotech. I even did a summer project on baking nanotubes and taking their pictures with an electron microscope as a result.
Sure but it's also not a pink elephant and not a flower pot. It's none of those things. We have just as much evidence of those objects flying through space as we have of alien spaceships so far. So it's odd asking "So is it a spaceship or not?" just like it's odd asking "so is it a flower pot?".
Is Musk's red car a spaceship btw? Because if we are able to send such stuff to space, other intelligent beings would most probably do the same. Or they are more intelligent?
That's my point! Anything could be in space, elephants, flower pots, EVs. But they picked a particular thing out of the possible universe of objects so was curious why they picked that. It's an asteroid emitting Ni atoms based on the paper. Do we have any evidence of alien spaceships doing that that?
Yes, in this case the telescope (array) is composed of many elements. The scopes themselves are very sensitive (so they can detect minute amounts of photons) and the combined array gives a much higher resolution (ability to see things that are very small very far away).
astronomy technology has been improving rapidly and the VLT is one of the best implementations for this kind of problem right now.
An easy home experiment is to get a gas flame, like in the stovetop that is blue and sprink a little of table salt. The important part is the sodium that gives the flame a very strong yellow color.
Salts without sodium give other colors. IIRC cooper gives a green color. This is used by firecrackers makers to get nice colors, and also in the chemistry lab to detect the composition of some salts.
After studding this king of stuff for a few centuries, we have a very good idea of how each element changes the color of the flame, or absorbs some colors of the light that pass trough the mist.
for example, the element Helium (which had been presumed to exist as a missing gap in the Aufbau model, but at the time not yet discovered) was first discovered not on Earth... but in the Sun! Spectroscopy confirmed the predicted spectrum. Once The element was confirmed to exist on the sun, they started looking for it on Earth and eventually found it on Earth as well.
