Asteroid that just appeared out of nowhere into our solar system called "Asteroid 1I/2017 UI aka Oumuamua." which is Hawaiian for :Messenger from afar arriving early: Oumuamua is an interstellar mothership like the one they found on the dark side of the moon and we are hearing and feeling the Space Warp drive sonic boom of it making a course correction as it slinged shot from around the Sun it's trajectory initially carried it below the solar system galactic plane, however, in came back up towards earth heading for Jupiter on a controlled path that is parallel to the solar plane.
A surprisingly elongated and reddish interstellar asteroid traverses our Solar System at full speed.
Although its elongated shape is quite surprising, and unlike the asteroids seen in our solar system, the asteroid 'Oumuamua can provide new clues as to how other solar systems were formed.
Everything seems to indicate that this unusual object had been wandering around the Milky Way, without being connected to any system related to a star, for hundreds of millions of years before its fortuitous encounter with our solar system.
"For decades we have theorized that such interstellar objects were out there, and now, for the first time, we have direct evidence that they exist," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "This historical discovery is opening a new window to study the formation of solar systems beyond ours."
'Oumuamua was first discovered on October 19 by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii. The rather small object was first classified as a comet but then considered as an asteroid, after other observations revealed that there was no evidence of a coma (the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the nucleus of a comet).
Immediately after its discovery, telescopes around the world, including the Very Large Telescope of ESO and Chile and other observatories around the world, were called into action to measure the orbit, the brightness and color of the object. The urgency to see from ground-based telescopes was vital to obtain the best information.
Combining the images of the FORS instrument in the ESO telescope (and using four different filters with those of other large telescopes) a team of astronomers led by Karen Meech of the Institute of Astronomy in Hawaii discovered that 'Oumuamua varies in brightness by a factor of ten. rotates on its axis every 7.3 hours. No known asteroid or comet in our solar system varies greatly in brightness, with such a large proportion between length and width. The most elongated objects we have seen to date are at most three times longer than wide.
"This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is very elongated: about ten times longer than it is wide, with a complex and complicated shape", Meech said. "We also discovered that it had a reddish color, similar to the outer objects of the solar system, and it was confirmed that it is completely inert, without the slightest trace of dust around it."
These properties suggest that 'Oumuamua is dense, composed of rocks and possibly metals, has no water or ice, and that its surface reddened due to the effects of the irradiation of cosmic rays over hundreds of millions of years.
Where does it come from and where does it go? Oumuamua
Preliminary orbital calculations suggest that the object came from the approximate direction of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation Lyra. However, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the trip, even at the speed of approximately 26.4 kilometers per second , that Vega was not close to that position when the asteroid was there about 300,000 years ago.
Although originally classified as a comet, observations from ESO and elsewhere did not reveal signs of cometary activity after passing on September 9 against the Sun at a dizzying speed of 87.3 kilometers per second.
Since then, the object has been reclassified as interstellar asteroid 1I / 2017 U1 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for giving official names to the organisms of the solar system and beyond. In addition to the technical name, the Pan-STARRS team called it 'Oumuamua' which is Hawaiian for '' a far-away messenger who arrives first ''.
Astronomers estimate that an interstellar asteroid similar to 'Oumuamua passes through the inner solar system approximately once a year, but they are weak and difficult to detect and have been lost so far. Recently, topographic telescopes, such as Pan-STARRS, are powerful enough to have the opportunity to discover them.
Observations of large ground-based telescopes will continue until the object becomes too weak to be detected, sometime after mid-December.
NASA's Center for Near-Earth Objective Studies continues to take all available tracking measures to refine the trajectory of UI 1/2017 as it leaves our solar system.
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