Interstellar object could be a time capsule from an era before the Universe

3I/ATLAS is around 10 billion years old and now allows us to study the evolution of objects originating from other stellar systems.

that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet and is suspected to have a nucleus about 5.6 kilometersand a potential mass of more than 33 billion tons.

But scientists were not satisfied with their knowledge of its path, tracked over time. A new one published in Astrophysical Journal and available on Arxiv I wanted to know where this mysterious object came from.

“We identified 93 nominal encounters, of which 62 are significant at the 2σ level. However, none of these encounters produced any relevant disturbance,” the authors write in the paper.

“The strongest perturber, Gaia DR3 6863591389529611264, at 0.30 pc and with a relative velocity of 35 km/s, caused only a velocity change of |∆v| ≃ 5 × 10⁻⁴ km/s in the 3I/ATLAS orbit. Our results indicate that no stellar flybys in the last 10 million years and within 500 pc, contained in Gaia DR3, can explain the trajectory current version of 3I/ATLAS or be associated with its origin”, they explain.

In other words, none of these close encounters (more or less) could explain the origin of 3I/ATLAS, having only slightly altered its trajectory.

“Taken together, all the data indicate that although 3I/ATLAS follows an orbit in the thin disk in the solar neighborhood, it may be an ancient object, consistent with ejection from a primitive disk of planetesimals in an early-formed system, or from an external Oort cloud, and is most likely associated with the rtransition region between the thin and thick disc, although its origin remains unknown”, says the team.

The team suggests that the object is around 10 billion years old, making it a kind of time capsule of the formation of the oldest planetary systems of the galaxy and the universe, explains .

“What makes 3I/ATLAS unique is that we allows you to study the evolution of objects originating from other stellar systems – something that until now we have only theorized”, added Pérez-Couto, researcher at the Center for Research in Information and Communication Technologies and team leader. “Each observation is like opening a window into the past of the Universe”.