Easy enough to test -- we'll eventually see another object following the same trajectory, give or take, but that's decelerating.
(Cue the dramatic music.)
One favourite daydream of mine is to think about how the Rama aliens' second and third probes would be received. I read Rama around the same time as Eon by Greg Bear, so I've always had an affinity for spin-gravity habitats filled with unknown stuff :)
With The Expanse TV series showing us how good hard scifi can be exciting and wonderful, I'm hoping we one day get an Eon or Rama series. Rama especially would work well in a hard scifi miniseries format.
(That's actually a great thought: that many shows thought impossible a couple of decades ago will now be made. Let's just hope they're made with love and devotion like The Expanse!)
That's the only way to explain how awful some of his last books were.
Having said that, I liked Richter 10. Too bad the co-author died before they could write another one.
It's fun to speculate, but I'm sure the reality of the situation is far more boring.
The thought makes me have goose-bumps. Did some alient race just take a close look at us? Was there a voyager-style plaque on it? I guess we'll never know now.
Occam tells us that in reality it is most likely just some space debris from some ancient rock-smashing incident, but the fact that this thing continues to defy classification allows us some space to imagine!
1 - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=voyager+gravity+slingshot+diagram&...
Look at it from a sampling bias perspective. The object at its brightest was very dim (19th magnitude) and moving fast. The ability for rapid, repeating full sky surveys is recent (PanSTARRS had been online for around a decade). The limiting magnitude of PanSTARRS is 24th. So if such other such objects exist, of course we are going to find the closest ones first since they are the brightest.
That is incorrect. All motion is not relative, only intertial motion is relative. Spinning implies acceleration on a body which is measurably different from any reference frame compared to a body that is not accelerating
Imagine you're off somewhere space. You're holding a ball in each hand.
1. You're motionless with reference to the Earth. You let go of the balls. They stay put.
2. You're moving away from the earth with a constant velocity. You let go of the balls. They continue to move at the same velocity as you do: This is indistinguishable from case 1.
3. You're accelerating away from the Earth (using rocket boots). You let go of the balls. They do not continue to accelerate with you.
4. You're motionless with respect to Earth, except that you're spinning. Think of the fastest you've ever spun. You'll be really dizzy when you stop. You let go of the balls. They fly off into space, because in order to stay spinning, they need acceleration toward the center of the spin plane. By letting them go, you stop that acceleration, and their trajectory changes (or really, their trajectory change stops).
Velocity is all relative, but acceleration is not. Spinning is acceleration.
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Here's another example:
You occupy a cosmos consisting only of you and an apple. You accelerate away from the apple for a moment, then stop accelerating. You now have a constant velocity away from the apple, but it's meaningless to say which of you is actually moving. You each perceive the other as moving away at constant velocity.
Now imagine you start spinning. You feel like you're spinning, and visually, you perceive the apple orbiting you at a bizarrely fast rate. From the apple's perspective, you are spinning. These two perceptions are not symmetric.
Is the point here that I’m spinning with reference to my direction of motion?
This is how plausible simulated gravity works too. A ship spins. It doesn’t require a reference to know whether it’s spinning.
Dirk Schulze had taken that as a subject into his sci-fiction book - Alien Encounter.
Now for a space ship, I agree. Though even then you might benefit from that extra matter in the same way.
Asteroid are per definition not interstellar though (until Oumuamua?).
I'd love to see a scenario where we'd build robot terraforming fleets that'd land on an uninhabited planet, make it habitable, complete with spaceports, cities, factories, crops (all permanently tended for robots), build a couple extra fleets and launch to their next most promising targets.
And then, for some reason, humans lose interest in all that and someone else wakes up to find a universe full of 60's futuristic utopian planets nobody ever lived in.
Reminds me of the paperclips game [1]. Would be horrid to find those people wake up and find the universe transformed into nothing but paperclips. [1]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18268008-alien-encounter
A tumbling probe that doubles as a cosmic pointer to home. Cool.
Maybe somebody should check if that "slightly acceleration" bring it closer or farther to Earth.
Maybe we have been photographed. I hope it's not that somebody shoot us and failed.