And how cool would it be to grab a piece of that rock, and run a few tests?
Mysterious Visitor From Another Solar System Flew by Earth, Leaving Astronomers Baffled
By Meghan Bartels
Astronomers may have spotted our first visitor from outside the bounds of our solar system: a hunk of ice called A/2017 U1 that a Hawaiian telescope identified on October 19. It's already headed back out away from Earth, and while scientists can study it for another few weeks, they say that after it waves goodbye, we'll never see it again.
Everything flying around space is pretty weird, but this one is extra weird, which is why astronomers are so excited about it—in fact, although scientists first dubbed it a comet, they're now not even sure what it is. The object's path has been difficult to track back in time from when it was first identified, but
scientists are pretty sure it doesn't belong to our solar system. That would make it the first interstellar visitor to be observed.
And if it turns out to be truly out of this world, it would be precisely what astronomers have been looking for. "We have long suspected that these objects should exist," said Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, which runs the telescope that spotted A/2017 U1, in a press release. "What's most surprising is that we've never seen interstellar objects pass through before."
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