Counting Interstellar Objects Could Take a Long Time! There Are More Out There Than We Think
Oumuamua was the first interstellar object humankind ever discovered and it was such a momentous discovery, some scientists were even wondering if it could be an alien spaceship. That was only in 2017, but just two years later astronomers discovered another ISO, this time a comet. Now some scientists are saying there are likely many more interstellar travelers in our solar system, but rather than simply passing through, they may have stayed and made a new home.
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00:00Oumuamua was the first interstellar object humankind ever discovered, and it was such
00:08a momentous discovery, some scientists were even wondering 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
00:22system, but rather than simply passing through, they may have stayed and made a new home.
00:27They call it ISO capture, and it's when one of these cosmic objects isn't moving fast
00:31enough to escape the gravity of the sun, eventually getting caught in its gravity well, ending
00:35up orbiting it just like all of the other objects in the solar system.
00:39The new study indicates that new observatories will be much better at identifying these objects,
00:43which they estimate they might be able to identify five every year.
00:47Most of them, they say, are likely caught up in the Oort cloud, or the theoretical cloud
00:50of debris and ice at the furthest reaches of our solar system.
00:54In fact, they even posit that more interstellar objects might have been captured and orbiting
00:58past Neptune than ones that derived from our solar system.
01:01What's more, the researchers also note that Earth and the Moon, along with Jupiter, could
01:05play a central role in the capturing of these objects, with the researchers saying that
01:09those three objects collectively increased the chances of capturing an ISO by a factor
01:14of 104.