Interstellar Interlopers, Coming in from the great beyond Options

[Holder of the Tw...]

They finally found a chunk of something coming into the Solar System. Something much bigger than cosmic rays or dust particles.

Asteroid/comet in hyperbolic trajectory

[nprev]

I was surprised to see this considering it's now a couple of years old. Looks like a small object in a retrograde 1:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter may be of extrasolar origin, and the same may be true of some Centaurs.

[JRehling]

I'll offer the caveat that this is not my field in any but an amateur sense, but the publication was accepted only three days after it was received, and, per the journal's own description, a "letter" constitutes a very light form of peer review wherein speed is favored over rigor.

That's an observation from a process point of view, but from the scientific, I'm very skeptical that simulations running back >4 billion years could speak unambiguously to the origins of an object. And I would opine that this is why the work was published only on a fast track two years ago without the world flocking to this as an exceptional result in the meantime.