Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid

Re:Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Ast... by mattlondon on Friday October 12, 2018 @06:39AM (#18200482)

Looking at the images on that site, the trajectory doing a "fly by" of a lot of the planets did look remarkedly like the sort of thing we've being doing for decades in our own solar system [1]- line up a bunch of planets and use gravity slingshots to do a close fly-by to get a closer look.

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&...

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Re:Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Ast... by godshatter on Friday October 12, 2018 @11:36AM (#18202132)

I wonder if it's speed increased on it's way out. Maybe it's on a multi-system route, using gravity assist as it goes to cut the route time down by a few thousand years here or there as it circles back around to it's home system. Must be very patient aliens, assuming no FTL messaging tech.

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