 Welcome back to the conversation this is your space pod for Thursday Jared there's a lot of question marks in this title what I what the Falcon is happening okay so every once in a while the universe kind of throws us a curveball but this one's not really a curveball this one's kind of like a fastball because it's it's a very fast object so really bizarre this is an actual one of a kind object that's currently cruising through our solar system it was spotted by the Panstars telescope which is the can I have this on a t-shirt please wouldn't that be cool yeah and this is just data from this is this is an optical view of that object that we're looking at from the virtual telescope project by the way that's amazing which is very cool which is which did not spot this object it was spotted by the Panstars telescope which pan stars for those of you keeping the acronym score out there is the panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system great background and this telescope is specifically supposed to look for near-earth objects and the data from the observations of this object which we initially called C 2017 U1 made no sense whatsoever it we found it at about 26 million kilometers away from the earth and the object is apparently outbound on its orbit which is not unusual to find things that are on their way out of from their closest approach to the solar system but it was traveling at like 40 kilometers a second and that's really unusual that's this object is moving so fast that it's gonna it's overcome the gravitational pull the sudden it is it's not just outbound it's leaving our solar system and it's never coming back so what they did is they grab some more images of it and they figured out its orbital parameters and it came in from nearly above the solar system what we call the solar apex and it came in at a velocity well above that of what we would expect of a typical comet so that means this could potentially be an interstellar object something zipping through our own solar system but its origins are outside of our solar system now the difficulty of building up speeds as fast as this object is moving just by natural interaction with objects in our own solar system are extremely low and as you can imagine when they published the orbital parameters of this object it caused a tremendous amount of attention to come towards it and it currently has the highest what we call orbital eccentricity of any object ever calculated within our solar system and just a little quick thing to sort of give you some factoids for orbital eccentricity is a measurement of how much a body in orbit deviates from a perfect circle so if you have zero eccentricity you have a perfect circle anything between zero and one is an elliptical orbit which is basically what most things are in one itself one eccentricity is an orbit on an escape trajectory so you're outbound anything above one is what we call a hyperbolic orbit that means you're not just outbound you are like good and gone outbound and this object has an orbit of 1.19 so it's above hyperbolic now we called it C 2017 U1 oh here's a great animation of the object coming in this animation lasts 500 years by the way it comes in and boom it's out of here dang so it just makes the complete about face now we actually called this object C 2017 U1 as a cometary designation because it's orbit but the observations that we've done so far show no coma or material coming off and gathering around what would be the nucleus of the comet so for the first time we reclassified an object from comet to asteroid so now it is a 2017 U1 they're gonna do additional observations by ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope as well they've gotten time on it and early spectral data from a 2017 U1 indicates that it is red in color much like many of the Kuiper Bell objects in our own solar system and its surface is relatively featureless there's nothing that we can make out it's not very big either they haven't pinned down an exact size yet but it's definitely under one kilometer in size so it's not a big object now there's likely been a lot of these kinds of objects that just coming to our solar system from interstellar space and then zip through but the thing is that we haven't had they probably haven't come as close to the Sun as this object has which then allows it to reflect more light and allow us to actually see it but it's a classic trajectory of what we would consider an interstellar object coming into the solar system and coming out and this is what we would expect from the formation of a star and anything around it because even when we model our own solar system Jupiter and Saturn they fling things out into interstellar space because things get close and they move at a fast enough velocity they overcome the gravitational pull of the Sun and they get flung out so this is not necessarily what we would call unprecedented in terms of does this actually happen yeah it does it's expected that that interstellar objects are out there it's just that we've never had the opportunity to actually look at an interstellar object and this is very very exciting and it's gonna give us a little potentially if it is an interstellar object a little sample of what what objects are composed of out there and then we can look at that compared to what we expect with our models and see if our models are correct modify them if need be and go from there so super exciting science yeah in real time so for the t-shirt for this is like I was a fan of a 2017 you won when it was see 2017 you won yeah yeah pretty good stuff so double-checking all right so if this kind of information still interests you and lots of other spacey goodness feel free to just so to subscribe to our channel and if you want more and would like to live and interact with us feel free to join us every Saturday at 1800 UTC