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Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by Teever on Thursday July 03, 2025 @02:09AM (#44452115)
> It is almost on the plane of the solar system, not very inclined.

Is this also random chance or is there a reason why it's so close to the plane of the solar system?

Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by ddahlen on Thursday July 03, 2025 @02:18AM (#44452157)
It is also a factor of where our surveys look on the sky. A lot of asteroid surveys have biases to look at the plane of our solar system (since this is where a lot of asteroids are).

It is probably random chance, however there may be some biases from where they come from on the sky (I know people who work on that, but I don't know much about it).

N=3 does not provide very robust statistics yet, give us another decade or two.

Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by sgt101 on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:00AM (#44452708)
We're going to see a lot more of these in the next couple of years due to the new Vera C Rubin observatory.
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by JumpCrisscross on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:05AM (#44452743)
Also the ELT [1], I believe. (Both come online this year.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by cyberlimerence on Thursday July 03, 2025 @05:59AM (#44453399)
ELT's first light is planned for March 2029.[1] Vera is already online I think.

[1] https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann25001/

Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by hermitcrab on Thursday July 03, 2025 @11:06AM (#44455823)
I can't believe that all those super-intelligent astronomers, who spend hours on their own in the dark, couldn't come up with a better name than 'Extremely Large Telescope'. ;0)
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by mcswell on Thursday July 03, 2025 @01:43PM (#44457460)
I guess they should have SuperSized™ it.
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by Tuna-Fish on Thursday July 03, 2025 @03:18PM (#44458310)
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by zorton on Saturday July 05, 2025 @06:45AM (#44471755)
Not terribly related but I got curious, the ELT has a reported angular resolution of 0.005 arcseconds. The sad state of public trust has resulted in many people no longer accepting the US landed on the moon at all. Tossing the question of what it would take to resolve the lunar landing sites into a LLM gives a broad requirement of 0.0005 arcseconds. Even still, you could never "prove" it to most people unless it's glass the entire way with no "hoax generating" computers involved.

It's a fun idea thought though.

Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by defrost on Thursday July 03, 2025 @02:20AM (#44452174)
Good question, especially given the plane of our solar system is almost orthogonal to the greater plane of the Milky Way galaxy that contains us.
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered by rbanffy on Thursday July 03, 2025 @07:10AM (#44453803)
I would expect most visitors would come from the galactic plane.