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

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

From the simulation you linked looks like it is passing closeish to the Mars... but I do know that space is big. However, I am curious of what would happen if an object of this magnitude hit mars at 90km/s.

Would be wild if a sufficiently large object with a lot of water and organic molecules hit Mars, ejected a lot of material in to Mars’ orbit to then go on to form a sufficiently large moon that tidally massaged Mars’ core to cause a dynamo to generate a sufficiently strong magnetic field to…

Terraform Mars!

in a somewhat related story, I was on a beach in Costa Rica last week, watching some spider monkeys in a palm tree trying to whack open small nuts. Just then, an American family walked up the beach with two teenage boys. They didn't notice the monkeys I was watching. But one of the boys grabbed a coconut off the sand and became determined to break it open with a rock in front of his parents. So watching the monkeys and the boy simultaneously, I had the distinct feeling of how slowly evolutionary, let alone geological, processes actually move.

Nice story.

But are you implying that we are somehow more evolved than the monkeys? Both the human and the monkey in the story have evolved for the same amount of time since our last common ancestor.