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306 points gammarator | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source

Minor Planet Electronic Circular: https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K25/K25N12.html
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ddahlen ◴[] No.44451980[source]
This one is coming in fast, it has an eccentricity of over 6 with the current fits. For point of reference, 1I and 2I have eccentricities of 1.2 and 3.3.

Right now it is mostly just a point on the sky, it is difficult to tell if it is active (like a comet) yet. If it is not active, IE: asteroid like, then the current observations put it somewhere between 8-22km in diameter (this depends on the albedo of the surface). From what we know, we would expect it to likely be made up of darker material meaning given that range of diameters it is more likely to be on the larger end. However if it is active, then the dust coming off can make it appear much larger than it is. As it comes in closer to the sun and starts to warm up it may become active (or more active if its already doing stuff).

It will not pass particularly close to any planet. It will be closest to the sun just before Halloween this year at 1.35 au, moving at 68 km/s (earth orbits at 29-30 km/s). It is also retrograde (IE, it is moving in the opposite direction of planetary motion), for an interstellar object this is basically random chance that this is the case.

Link to an orbit viewer: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=3I&vi...

The next couple of weeks will be interesting for a bunch of people I know.

Source: Working on my PhD in orbital dynamics and formerly wrote the asteroid simulation code used on several NASA missions: https://github.com/dahlend/kete

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noduerme ◴[] No.44452015[source]
What planets is it passing between?
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ddahlen ◴[] No.44452027[source]
It is inside jupiter's orbit now, it will come inside Mars for a time. It is almost on the plane of the solar system, not very inclined.

I linked an orbit viewer above if you want to look.

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noduerme ◴[] No.44452570[source]
Huh. It looks like on 10/2 it will make its closest pass to a planet, Mars, and on that date it also is in a straight line with Mars, Mercury and the sun, while Earth and Venus are roughly opposite each other. Do you know if this sim accounts for solar or martian gravity diverting its trajectory?
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1. ddahlen ◴[] No.44453187[source]
This orbit visualization uses a simple 2 body approximation, so only the sun. This is because unless an object has a VERY close approach to a planet the two body approximation is more then enough for this style of visualization.

I did a full proper n-body integration and it is not visually different than this.