Oxford physicist wants you to help ‘really exciting’ interstellar visitor

Have you ever wondered where we come from? Not just us humans, but the entire solar system?

The truth is, we really don’t know. But scientists hope that by understanding our distant neighbors, we can find answers.

“We have to start thinking of the solar system as part of the Milky Way,” said Professor Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. Weekly newspaper. “We have a residential community and our neighbors come over occasionally to visit.”

Lintott is also the author and co-presenter of the BBC’s long-running astronomy program night sky, studies these galactic guests, scientifically known as interstellar objects. Only two such objects have been discovered so far – the mysterious cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua discovered in 2017 and Comet Borisov discovered in 2019.

“Things coming from beyond our solar system may sound like science fiction, but we actually think this is happening all the time,” Lintott said. “These things have been wandering around the Milky Way for millions, even billions of years. , and then they happen to pass through our solar system. There may be an interstellar object passing through the solar system now, we just haven’t discovered it yet.”

But why do astrophysicists like Linto study these objects?

“They’re our only chance to get up close and personal with different solar systems,” Lintott said. “We don’t really understand how the solar system formed. We know the basics. We know that in the beginning it was basically dust and sand and gas, Gravity pulls all these things together to form planets, but almost all the details—like how many planets like Earth there are, how big planets like Jupiter affect other planets—all of these questions are completely open to scrutiny. By looking at the components of the different solar systems, we can begin to answer these questions.

“The first thing we want to know is what these things are made of, and we think these things formed at the same time that planets were forming around stars, so if we can figure out what they are made of [we could potentially begin to] Learn how planets formed elsewhere.

Today, these objects are difficult to spot—we have to point telescopes and surveying instruments to the right place at the right time. But that’s all about to change.

“We are building a telescope called the Vera Rubin Observatory,” Linto said. “It has the world’s largest digital camera, as big as the largest telescopes in the world today, and it will perform a very special job: it will scan the entire sky every three nights and send alerts if any objects are detected. Changes in brightness or movement.

Lintott hopes these observations will provide us with the data we need to discover more interstellar interlopers. In fact, over the course of a decade of research, we can expect dozens of such findings.

“When I feel particularly optimistic, it’ll probably be around the year 1,000,” Lintott said. “It’s really exciting.”

This is where you come in: “The machine [that crunch all these numbers] It turns out it’s good at telling you what’s unusual, but not very good at telling you what’s interesting,” Lintott said. “So we thought we needed people and volunteers to tell us what unusual things deserve more attention.

To get involved, head to the free Zooniverse citizen science platform and join millions of volunteers around the world collaborating on the next “astronomy revolution.”

To learn more about exploring the secrets of the universe, you can read Linto’s latest book, accidental astronomyreleased in June.

“These things are out there, and if we have the right technology, we can catch them,” Lintott said.

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