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306 points gammarator | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source

Minor Planet Electronic Circular: https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K25/K25N12.html
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ordu ◴[] No.44451907[source]
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.

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1. slightwinder ◴[] No.44456797[source]
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.