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kleinbl00  ·  1644 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rama II officially named 2l Borisov

"I mean, obviously," he said, temporarily taking off his moonbeam sunshine hat, "the likelihood of natural extrasolar objects ending up passing through the solar system is greater than zero and a better understanding of that process would be a great boon to a panoply of physical sciences. I would presume that interstellar debris would be crucial in collimating our local environment to that of the rest of the local cluster and a sense of the frequency and severity of these encounters would teach us a lot about star formation, the interstellar medium and the basics of..."

RAMAAAAA!!!!!!

There's obviously a straightforward mathematical relationship between the mass of an object, that object's velocity and the gravitational influence of our solar system such that we could calculate a rough approximation of the composition of the interstellar medium from the survey of similar objects we record. This is the sort of thing that gave us the Hubble constant. And studying these interstellar objects, as well as the increased level of scrutiny we can level at our own solar system using the same tools, is a laudable scientific goal.

It will also be better for finding RAMA because a random space rock that happens to course through is vastly less interesting than an extraterrestrial arcology traipsing between Kardashev II civilizations, dammit.