Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 6 hours ago
Transcript
00:04Oumuamua was the first interstellar object humankind ever discovered, and it was such a momentous discovery, some scientists were even
00:11wondering if it could be an alien spaceship.
00:13But just two years later, astronomers discovered another ISO, this time a comet.
00:18Now some scientists are saying there are likely many more interstellar travelers in our solar system, but rather than simply
00:24passing through, they may have stayed and made a new home.
00:26They call it ISO capture, and it's when one of these cosmic objects isn't moving fast enough to escape the
00:32gravity of the sun, eventually getting caught in its gravity well, ending up orbiting it just like all of the
00:37other objects in the solar system.
00:39The new study indicates that new observatories will be much better at identifying these objects, which they estimate they might
00:44be able to identify five every year.
00:46Most of them, they say, are likely caught up in the Oort cloud, or the theoretical cloud of debris and
00:51ice at the furthest reaches of our solar system.
00:53In fact, they even posit that more interstellar objects might have been captured and orbiting past Neptune than ones that
00:59derived from our solar system.
01:01What's more, the researchers also note that Earth and the Moon, along with Jupiter, could play a central role in
01:06the capturing of these objects, with the researchers saying that those three objects collectively increased the chances of capturing an
01:13ISO by a factor of 104.
01:15544.
Comments

Recommended