A scientist has ‘cracked’ the mystery of an ‘interstellar object’ that is hurtling through our solar system at a whopping 150,000 miles an hour.
A physicist believes he has the answer to the mysterious 12-mile-wide unidentified object that is currently flying through the solar system.
According to Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and student researcher Shokhruz Kakharov, the giant object, which has become known as 3I/ATLAS, originates back to a thicker part of the Milky Way galaxy’s disk.
This is an area where older stars are often found.
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As reported by the Daily Mail, Loeb said: “Simply put, 3I/ATLAS is among the elders in our cosmic block.”
It is thought that the object, which the expert believes may be a comet, could be even older than our 4.6 billion year old sun.
The object is one of three interstellar objects that the scientist is observing.
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In an article by Medium, Loeb wrote: “How quickly did it take these objects to migrate from the opposite side of the Milky-Way disk relative to the Sun? For 1I/`Oumuamua, the time is about a billion years; for 2I/Borisov, it is 1.7 billion years, and for 3I/ATLAS, it is 0.8 billion years. Through their orbit around the Milky-Way, all three objects travel a few thousand light-years closer to the Galactic center than the Sun does.”
The Milky Way is classed as a barred spiral galaxy, which means it has a central bulge, a bar-shaped structure of stars, and spiral arms extending from the ends of the bar. The disk of the galaxy, where most of the stars reside, is relatively flat and thin compared to the central bulge.
While our solar system lies within around a thousand light-years of the central plane of the galaxy, 3I/ATLAS originated a few thousand light-years above the Milky Way's mid-plane, meaning it is likely older.
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In the study, it was found that it took the object around 800 million years of travel to reach our solar system.
3I/ATLAS will be tracked over the next year and while it is expected to pass at its closest point to Earth in December this year, experts don’t believe the object will actually get anywhere close to our planet.
Instead, it is thought that the closest it will get to Earth is roughly 223 million miles away.
As the object travels through our solar system, it’s expected to pass by Jupiter in March 2026.