snoocher
This past October earth got its first visit from one of the Milky Way galaxy’s many loners. Discovered on October 19th by Haleakala, Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, the asteroid was seen already leaving the solar system mumbling about nobody saying, ‘Hi!’, ‘You’ve traveled so far!,’ or, ‘How are you?’. The asteroid had its closest approach to earth on October 14th but it wasn’t discovered until 5 days later on October 19th. Astronomers at NASA commented that the Asteroid needs to be reach out to us as well, and that communication is a two-way street. Comets and asteroids found around the solar system have been found to be bound to the sun and the solar system itself, but this is the first asteroid that appears to be an interstellar traveler and a bit weird.
A media spokesman for NASA stated, “We interviewed the asteroid as straightforward as we could. We asked it questions such as, ‘Where was it from?’, ‘What was it made of?’ But, we could never get a straight realistic answer from it.” The asteroid stated that it was actually 1000 kilometers wide and had a mass equivalent to 2 Jupiters, which the NASA scientists discovered was far from the truth at only around 400 meters in width with a similar smaller mass. This hyperbolic behavior pointed toward an origin outside our known solar system.
While the asteroid sped away from earth, Astronomers and scientists raced to train their telescopes on the interstellar interloper to learn as much as they could about its journey. Astronomers that were the first to get their telescopes on the asteroid determined it had such hobbies as keeping old receipts, crocheting, stone skipping, and, despite being at least 15,000 years old, Yu-gi-oh cards. This eccentricity was more evidence that the passer-by was indeed pretty odd. NASA calculated an eccentricity of 1.19 for the asteroid which would be explained by the thousands of years of traveling through a dark cold void would do. The asteroid has left as quickly as it rudely barged through in to our solar system and will never return. Although this is the first interstellar asteroid recorded, astronomers theorize that the galaxy is full of these interstellar loners because their star systems rejected them.
