UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Contributed by

Phil Plait

@BadAstronomer

This is a pretty big deal: A newly discovered object currently heading out of our solar system is looking very much like it’s our first true interstellar visitor: an asteroid from another star.

Yes. Seriously.

It’s called A/2017 U1, and it’s probably less than about 400 meters wide. It was discovered just last week, on October 19, in observations made by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). This telescope sweeps the skies, looking for moving objects. Right away it looked like this was an unusual object: It was moving too fast.

Teh path of A/2017 U1 took it from interstellar space to deep inside the solar system on a hyperbolic orbit. A typical highly elliptical comet orbit is shown for comparison.

Credit: Brooks Bays / SOEST Publication Services / UH Institute for Astronomy

But if an object is at the same distance as the Earth from the Sun and moving faster than about 42 km/sec, the object is no longer bound to the Sun. This means the object is moving faster than escape velocity (the shape of the orbit is a hyperbola), and will never return. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

A/2017 U1 passed the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury in early September, curving sharply due to the Sun’s gravity, and is now on its way out. It’s already farther away from the Sun than Earth is, moving at a very brisk 44km/sec. That’s too fast. It’s not going to come back; it’s heading out into interstellar space^*.

How did it get this much speed? Sometimes, objects like comets can get an extra kick by passing by a big planet like Jupiter. But A/2017 U1’s orbit doesn’t bring it near any big planets. In fact, the orbit is tilted to the plane of the solar system by 122°, nearly perpendicular to it. That means it had this huge speed already on its way in.

And that means it must have come from interstellar space. From another star. ^†

In fact, tracing the orbit backwards, it looks like it came somewhere from the constellation of Lyra, and was already cruising through interstellar space at a speed of over 25 km/sec! At that speed so far out it can’t possibly have an origin inside our solar system, so this is truly an alien object.

Holy wow. I mean, holy wow.

At first it was thought this might be a comet, but very deep images of it show no activity from it at all, no escaping gas or dust. That makes it extremely unlikely to have any ice on its surface, things like frozen water, carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide, which are usually seen in comets. Instead, it must be rocky or metallic, like an asteroid. At the moment it’s not clear what it’s made of, but a lot of telescopes are being aimed at it; hopefully soon a spectrum may reveal its composition. That’ll be very interesting indeed.

The interstellar asteroid A/2017 U1, images using a 40 cm telescope when the object was about 60 million km from Earth and at a magnitude of 22 (that’s very faint).

Credit: Gianluca Masi (Virtual Telescope Project) and Michael Schwartz (Tenagra Observatory)

If it happened here, it happened out there, too. The galaxy is probably littered with rogue objects between the stars, the ejecta from birth pangs of alien solar systems. We’ve seen evidence of rogue planets, ejected in a similar way. It’s certain that there is far more smaller debris out there. Finding one of these asteroids passing through our own solar system was just a matter of time.

I’ll note that the direction it’s coming from, Lyra, is in the galactic plane: Where most of the stars in the galaxy are concentrated. That’s consistent; if it’s coming from another star far, far away then somewhere along the Milky Way’s disk is the most likely point of origin.

This is a phenomenal discovery! Stars are very far away; the nearest is over 40 trillion kilometers — a 50,000 year journey at A/2017 U1’s speed. And it certainly came from much farther away yet. It may have been traveling for millions or even billions of years before approaching our system.

Shapes of various orbits. A mild ellipse (red) has an eccentricity of less than 1, a parabola 1 (green), and a hyperbola greater than 1 (blue).

Credit: Wikipedia / Seahen

Bill Gray of the Pluto Project has been keeping track of the orbital path of this asteroid. I asked him where it appears to be heading, and he told me it’s in the direction of Pegasus (toward a point in the sky with coordinates of RA=23h 51m and Dec=+24° 49', if you’re curious). There aren’t any obvious stars at that spot except for HD 223531, which is 400 light years away. A/2017 U1 won’t really get all that close to it, and won’t pass it for another million years or more anyway (and by the that time the star will have moved substantially, too).

… still, I can’t help but wonder. I put absolutely no weight on this speculation, and would even bet heavily against it, but it’s an obvious thought and I feel I have to at least mention it.

Space is vast. Even in our solar system, the outer planets are billions of kilometers away, with smaller icy objects extending for a trillion or two past that. No doubt, there is debris from other stars passing us at all kinds of distances. Most would never get within a light year, 10 trillion km.

From that distance, the inner solar system is a ridiculously small target. Mercury’s orbit is only about 115 million km across. For something coming from interstellar space, getting that close to the Sun is threading the eye of a very, very narrow needle.

Yet A/2017 U1 did just that. It passed the Sun at a distance of about 45 million kilometers. That’s… weird.

Part of this is what we call a selection effect: An object like this passing out by the orbit of Jupiter would be very faint, so it’s harder to discover. We only see the ones that happen to pass close to Earth. So even before this, I would’ve wagered the first one we discover would be passing through the inner solar system as opposed to farther out.

But still, getting that close to the Sun seems unusual.

Let me be clear: I am NOT saying this is an alien spaceship. But if I were an alien race interested in exploring other systems, this is pretty much the sort of path I’d put my probe on. I’d aim it to pass deep within the alien solar system, check out the habitable planets, and use the star’s gravity to bend the orbit to aim it at the next target.

Again, I’m quite sure this is a natural object and not an alien spaceship. Even so, it’s certainly not a mundane one: It’s a freaking asteroid ejected from another star that’s been wandering the galaxy for eons and passed a few million kilometers from the Sun and Earth and is on its way back out into the void!

Either way, I wish Arthur C. Clarke had lived to see this. He’d have loved it.

^*The shape of an orbit is described by its eccentricity, which you can think of as how far it deviates from a circle. An eccentricity of 0 is a perfect circle, and ellipses have eccentricities up to 1. A parabola has an eccentricity of exactly 1, and anything greater than 1 is a hyperbola. A/2017 U1 has an eccentricity of about 1.2. At first there weren’t enough observations to be sure about that, but now there are so many that the uncertainty in the eccentricity is less than 0.003. It’s hyperbolic for sure. Staggering.

^†There’s another possibility: If there’s another planet in our solar system orbiting far, far beyond Neptune, and the asteroid started somewhere nearby (that is, as part of our solar system since the start) and passed close to this planet, it could get a kick in velocity and get flung down towards us at higher speed. However, a lot of things have to line up for this to happen so the odds on this are incredibly low, so low I’d put them at essentially 0. But I’d be remiss not to at least mention it. [UPDATE (Oct. 29, 2017): Bill Gray (mentioned in the article) sent me a note; he points out that even if such an encounter happened, it's essentially impossible for it to give a kick to the asteroid large enough to get it moving at 25 km/sec, the excess speed U1 was moving when it was still far from the Sun. I agree, so ignore this footnote!]

Available now is the new book from Kevin Randle. Its title:Encounter In The Desert. The subtitle: The Case For Alien Contact At Socorro. If you know your UFO history, you’ll know exactly what the title of the book refers to. Namely, an incident that went down on April 24, 1964 and which, for many, has become a UFO classic. It was on the afternoon of the day in question that local police-officer Lonnie Zamora broke off from pursuing a teenager in a speeding car and headed to a nearby dynamite shack. The reason? A sudden roaring sound coming roughly from the area where the shack was positioned. Quite naturally, Zamora thought that there may have been an explosion at the site. He was wrong. What Zamora came across – many UFO researchers believe – was nothing less than a landed UFO, piloted by two smallish humanoids dressed in white. A close encounter? For many, yes. But not for all.

Those who are skeptical of the Socorro affair suggest that what came down may have been a vehicle of the military. Others suggest that an ingenious prank was the cause of all the fuss. The story was told extensively in Ray Stanford’s 1976 book, Socorro “Saucer” In A Pentagon Pantry. Now, more than forty years after Stanford’s book was published, we have Kevin Randle’s take on Socorro. It’s clear from very early on that Randle is of the opinion that what landed at – and soon took off from – Socorro was an alien spacecraft. To his credit, though, Randle tackles just about every theory under the Sun.

That something happened is not a matter for debate. Something clearly did. The big question is: what, exactly, happened? We know that the local police, the Air Force and the FBI all took a deep interest in the case. In part, surely, because the primary witness was a then-serving police officer. I say “primary” because, as Randle notes, there is evidence of other witnesses having seen something too.

Randle takes us on a real-life detective story as he seeks to uncover the truth of the weird event. We are treated to a good, solid study of the case, of the craft that Zamora encountered, and of the diminutive pilots. Randle also demonstrates that the Air Force’s Project Blue Book undertook an in-depth investigation of the controversy. It was an investigation handled seriously and carefully by the USAF.

Personally, I have no firm conclusion regarding what happened on that April 24, 1964 day. And, having read Randle’s book, I’m still not sure what to think of it. Yes, Randle does indeed make a good case that the claims of the craft being one of ours doesn’t really hold water. He cites, for example, the words of Hector Quintanilla, who was in charge of the USAF’s operation, Project Blue Book, at the time. Quintanilla followed a theory that perhaps what Zamora had seen had military origins. Randle refers to “…some special tests being conducted at White Sands involving a Lunar Surveyor and helicopters.” While this looks promising – in terms of an answer – we learn that Quintanilla, having addressed this theory, came away “dejected” and convinced that “the answer to Zamora’s experience” was not to be found in military experiments, after all.

Randle also has a 17-page chapter on the hoax theory. Philip Klass – a real piece of work who I crossed swords with in the 1990s – crops up in this chapter, as one would expect. A definitive debunker – rather than an open-minded skeptic – Klass pursued various clues and data to try and make a case for a hoax. His conclusions were not particularly persuasive. Far more interesting, though, is a relatively recent claim which suggests the whole thing was concocted by a bunch of local students, and who had grievances against Zamora. Randle says: “Zamora harassed the students for seemingly no reason, and at every possible opportunity. Many of the college kids did not like him.” This is a very intriguing chapter which, I suspect, will make some conclude that a hoax is indeed what it was. Randle offers his thoughts, however, as to why he disagrees with this scenario.

While Randle does make a good argument for something unknown having touched down, there is one thing that I found seriously distracting. The book runs to 284 pages, which is enough for a solid conclusion to be reached. But, here’s the problem I have: There is a lot of material in the book which has zero to do with the Socorro case. For example, Randle notes carefully that beings – whether human or alien – were seen around the craft. So, as a result of this, we have an entire chapter (Chapter 6, titled “Other ‘Unidentified’ Occupant Sightings”) on this aspect of Ufology. We’re told of a landing with entities in Kansas in 1952, of an Oklahoma-based incident in 1966, and of one in Berlin, Germany in 1950. Of course, there is nothing wrong with noting this. But, a 12-page chapter, which has nothing to do with Socorro? Randle could have made his point – that there are good, other landing/occupant cases on record – in a couple of paragraphs. As I see it, this chapter comes across as filler, as padding, to make the book longer.

I felt exactly the same about Chapter 7, “Psychological Solutions.” This chapter includes nothing less than a 10-page section on the 1952 “Flatwoods Monster” saga. It also includes a 13-page study of the famous Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky “Goblin” incident of 1955. Combined, that’s 23-pages. Yes, Randle makes valid points concerning various parallels to the Socorro incident. But, just as I said in the paragraph immediately above, this chapter too comes across as filler. Chapter 11 is 24-pages long and it deals with other landing cases. Yes, again, Randle makes connections between Socorro and these other landing-themed ones. But – also again – Randle could have made his point in a page or two. Or even less. The material I have issues with amounts to almost 60 pages of the book, and which really has very little to do with Socorro at all. It could all have been condensed and wrapped up in a few pages. Or combined into one chapter. The text of the book is 249 pages (minus the Bibliography, Index etc), so roughly a quarter of the book veers away from Socorro.

That said, I do recommend people read Randle’s book, as it’s high time that a new study of the Socorro case surfaced. And, now, it has. The padding aside, this is a good study of the April 1964 incident and will almost certainly provoke lively debates among ufologists.