An astronomers team believe that they have chanced upon a multitude of interstellar visitors, a group of asteroids orbiting Jupiter. The scientists think that these are not from our solar system instead they came from “elsewhere but got trapped in the Sun’s gravitational pull”.
There are nineteen such asteroids in near Jupiter’s orbit which are called the Centaurs. While it was first noticed in the year of 2015, scientists are still studying “their unusual behaviour”. Usually, other interstellar visitors like “21/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua” go throughout our solar system as they carry on their cosmic journeys. However, the Centaurs seem to have got trapped within the solar system whereby making them an interesting case. Moreover, to find one interstellar visitor would be a “rare scientific find” but here with the Centaur we have an “entire population” something that has never been recorded.
The astronomers reversed-engineered the Centaurs’ orbit which showed that many of them fell either “on a bizarre plane” of revolved in the “wrong director”. As a result, the team thinks the best fit explanation for this would be that “the objects drifted in from interstellar space”.
However, the possibility of these asteroids having “unusual orbits” still remains although the exact reason behind the same cannot as yet be elaborated. As per Gizmodo report, some of the astronomers have “pushed back against the team’s earlier publications on the Centaurs” although there has not been any “peer-reviewed research” so far to debunk the whole theory. According to the report on futurism.com:
“The main problem other academics had with the team’s ongoing research is that they didn’t fully eliminate other possibilities for why the Centaurs are so, well, weird. But given that “they came from elsewhere” is one of the few explanations for the asteroids’ orbits that didn’t violate the laws of physics, the team is pretty confident in their work”.
References:
futurism.com
There are nineteen such asteroids in near Jupiter’s orbit which are called the Centaurs. While it was first noticed in the year of 2015, scientists are still studying “their unusual behaviour”. Usually, other interstellar visitors like “21/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua” go throughout our solar system as they carry on their cosmic journeys. However, the Centaurs seem to have got trapped within the solar system whereby making them an interesting case. Moreover, to find one interstellar visitor would be a “rare scientific find” but here with the Centaur we have an “entire population” something that has never been recorded.
The astronomers reversed-engineered the Centaurs’ orbit which showed that many of them fell either “on a bizarre plane” of revolved in the “wrong director”. As a result, the team thinks the best fit explanation for this would be that “the objects drifted in from interstellar space”.
However, the possibility of these asteroids having “unusual orbits” still remains although the exact reason behind the same cannot as yet be elaborated. As per Gizmodo report, some of the astronomers have “pushed back against the team’s earlier publications on the Centaurs” although there has not been any “peer-reviewed research” so far to debunk the whole theory. According to the report on futurism.com:
“The main problem other academics had with the team’s ongoing research is that they didn’t fully eliminate other possibilities for why the Centaurs are so, well, weird. But given that “they came from elsewhere” is one of the few explanations for the asteroids’ orbits that didn’t violate the laws of physics, the team is pretty confident in their work”.
References:
futurism.com