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.
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)
I guess they should have SuperSized™ it.
At this point, it is tradition.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparis...
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.
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.