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A comment on The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space. Parent comment

Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by robin_reala on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @04:35AM (#15746790)
And of course, of all the planets in the solar system, it made its closest approach to Earth, an astronomical "near miss" at just 0.16 AU

That is presumably because there’re lots of these objects, but we can only detect the ones closest to us.

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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by Tossrock on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @04:46AM (#15746835)
The authors estimate that there is ~1 such object within 1 AU of the sun at any given time. So, more common than we previously expected, but not exactly teeming. You're right that it was detected due to its nearness though - it was picked up in a routine near-Earth object survey by Pan-STARRS
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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by ldenneau on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:12AM (#15746937)
If there is one within 1 AU of the Sun at any given time, then there are ~10^16 of them within a sphere out to the nearest star. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's teeming or not.
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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by Tossrock on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:21AM (#15746968)
Dr. Denneau, what an honor that you dropped by this comment thread! Congratulations on the publication, it's a truly groundbreaking discovery :) 10^16 is pretty mindbogglingly huge, but then again so is 4 light years...
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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by soVeryTired on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @07:18AM (#15747366)
Surely they're more dense near the sun? Not sure you can assume a uniform spacing and not account for the gravitational attraction. But I'm sure you know more about this than I do.
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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by jerf on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @11:32AM (#15749062)
If they're not being captured, they're just being perturbed by the sun a bit, not collected.
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Re:The first known object to enter our solar system from dee... by bmm6o on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @08:43PM (#15753501)
1 within 1 AU of the sun means that there should be one passing within 0.16 AU of us on a ~yearly basis.
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