[ad_1]
Astronomers were astonished enough when they spotted interstellar visitors last year: Comets 2l / Borisov and ʻOumuamua. As we move through time and space along with Earth, things can get much weirder than anyone could hope for.
Centaur asteroids are the main culprits of the show now, as scientists Fathi Namouni from Université Côte d’Azur in France and Helena Morais from UNESP in Brazil believe that space objects belong to places beyond our solar system, to other stars. Space rocks are in orbit around Jupiter, and have very inclined orbits compared to the plane of the rest of the planets.
19 asteroids likely to originate from another Solar System
Scientists built a computer simulation and played inside it in reverse of the behavior of millions of imaginary objects that fit the orbital parameters of the BZ509 2015 asteroids (514107). Most of the simulated objects crashed into the Sun and on other planets. Others were removed from the solar system.
Namouni and Morais continued their investigation by running similar inverse-time computer simulations for more Centaur asteroids. For 19 of the asteroids, the stable orbits took orientations relative to the planets that could not be explained if the objects were born in our own solar system. Thus, the scientists concluded that they had found an entire population of asteroids captured from outside the solar system.
2l Borisov was the second interstellar visitor discovered when Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov shocked the world last year and found the object. As you may have already guessed, the cosmic object is named after the astronomer who discovered it. Therefore, Mr. Borisov discovered the second interstellar object: Comet 2l / Borisov. This object traveled through entire light years from another solar system to ours.
Findings regarding Centaurs asteroids were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
