Astronomers discover 3I/ATLAS – Third interstellar object to visit Solar System

Judging by how humanity didn't see any of those for millennia and now three in just several years, I can propose two hypotheses:

1. Astronomers became good enough to notice them 2. These rocks are first in an incoming flood of such objects, the Universe decided to destroy humanity.

hah! Yeah the title "Third Interstellar Object Discovered" needs to be changed to be more like "Third Discovery of an Interstellar Object"

3. After we found the first one by chance we started looking for more objects outside the solar system's orbital plane

I get that you're joking, but I wonder if it could just be that we happen to be passing through some sort of interstellar debris cloud.

It's 1. A combination of better telescopes and GPU accelerated algorithms for picking out moving objects.

> These rocks are first in an incoming flood of such objects

When ʻOumuamua flew past, we should have noticed it was a passive sensor drone. Now it is too late.

I love this. But I can't help imagining the conversation on some remote South Pacific island going like this:

"Third cargo chest discovered"

"Maybe they've been sailing by here already for a long time and we just didn't notice."

It's not "the Universe"; it's an alien race that wants to destroy us before we become a threat to them.

This object is near the solar system's orbital plane - far closer than Halley's comet, for example.

People have searched off the orbital plane for a long time, if only to find new comets.

This object was found by ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. The project goal is to identify near-earth asteroids, evaluate the risk they might impact the Earth, and alert others if impact is predicted.

The project started in 2015, two years before ʻOumuamua. It was not made specifically to find interstellar objects transiting the solar system.

We are a much bigger threat to ourselves.

Yep, the best thing for a race that is (rightfully) worried about our aggressiveness is to wait it out.

I believe #1 is true; but not #2. It's just that those rocks are more common than we thought. And we thought they were uncommon because we weren't able to spot them... yet.

Came here to say that. Best to just wait and let history take its course.

Or launch an attack fleet, only to later, due to an error in a scaling factor, have the entire fleet unknowingly swallowed by a small dog.

Get ready for the, uh, Latter Day Late Heavy Bombardment!

Vera Rubin just came online, will will start to do surveys of the entire sky every 3 nights, which makes spotting stuff like this easier.

https://youtu.be/X3N-DjVXh44

so we are probably gonna notice a lot more of them

Actually we’re in a surprisingly sparse area of the galaxy, a giant hole in the galaxy created by one (or more) supernova.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble

un-nervingly near the orbital plane, as the depiction shows the object passing just above, on approach, and juct below, on departure, of the orbital plane of mars given the low relative speed of these objects so far, we can define them as extra solar, something exra galactic could be moveing at fractional light speed relative to us and be almost impossible to see and track unless it was realy big and close, and as there are confirmed exra galactic stars, it is not conjecture to to then include rouge planets and asteriods ,etc in the list of signatures to be looking for, and perhaps dismissed from previous data as bieng equipment artifacts or noise.

We don't know if they're all rocks or not yet.

Maybe. The solar system was in this galactic position about 250 million years ago (one galactic year) and there was a major extinction event around that time

So much for the old thermonuclear ramjet idea....

It's more complicated than that.

Benevolent aliens are planting incompetent people in positions of power so that we are perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation. But this is all to save us from the malevolent aliens who would obliterate us if they thought we had any chance of survival.

We hadn't the means to discover them for most of the last millennia, so now being good enough is obvious. But the question is why now, and not 10 or 20 years ago. It might be that we had the ability for a longer time already, but it just never "clicked" until now to recognize them. It is also possible that we really just got good enough recently. Or even that until now, there really were none in the last decade we could find, and we are just lucky(?) that now more are coming our way.

We might know this better in the next years, depending on whether there will now be an explosion of dozen and dozens of new interstellar objects discovered, or not. It might be another rush, like with exoplanets and local dwarf-planets.