Let's Find Out - Another Interstellar Object? (C/2019 Q4 BORISOV) | ASMR

Starting point is 00:00:12 official guys were being visited by aliens and I don't know about you guys but I'm taking notes because I want to know when their closest approach to earth is because you know that's when they're coming to beam oh us up can about this new interstellar object now we we first of all thanks to thanks to random no your name's orbital I don't know I was about to call you random observer. Uh, you, you were the person who drew my attention to this new interstellar object. I'm not really one to browse new news.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Is that a thing? Very often. So, um, yeah, it's really cool. I, you know, obviously love your comments pertaining to my videos, but I also love you guys kind of are, are my, certainly a source of information for me. So I appreciate you, man. Um. And I assume you're a male because you have a picture of Carl Sagan as your profile thing, which is super cool.

Starting point is 00:01:30 So let's get into this interstellar visitor number two in two years. The last one was O-M-M-U-M-A, O-U-A-M-U-A. O-M-U-A. O-M-M-U-A was an interstellar object we observed in 2017. We're much more technologically advanced, especially in the past 50 years or so. And we have been in all of history for hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of years.

Starting point is 00:02:07 So we might have been, you know, these might be a regular occurrence in the last million years or so. It might be natural objects, but there was, with the Amuamua, the brass tax of it all was the reason it peaked the interest of many actual scientists, astronomers, cosmologists was because its acceleration was higher than could be accounted for by our current understanding of celestial mechanics.

Starting point is 00:02:36 And that was, you know, course, par for speculation. It's an object we clearly know by that super cool introductory graphic, I'm sure I'm going to put in there. It's if this is the plane of the solar system here this object wasn't orbiting or even coming from anywhere near along the plane It was kind of just coming directly from above and shooting out through the bottom if there is a bottom again It's all relative in space It was just fascinating because it was clearly from not from our solar system It was traveling really fast and it had this really interesting oblong, you know, cigar or pencil-like shape. Of course, immediately any science fiction fans made the connection with rendezvous with Rama, this huge cylindrical spaceship.

Starting point is 00:03:38 I mean, miles long, like 20 miles long. It was wide enough to have its own atmosphere on the inside. and when it's rotating in that sort of manner you can imagine like those uh gravatron 3,000 things at a local fair actually makes it so that you can walk on the inside and it can be you know manually adjusted to simulate earth level earth levels of gravity so this so that's that object and this one is another one that's come think from a very similar trajectory it was discovered by a man named Borisov let's get correct information here the object formally is named C forward slash 2 2019

Starting point is 00:04:38 Q4 Borisov Borisov in honor of genadi ganadi Borosov an astronomer I was going to say amateur with the Crimean astrophysical observatory who first detected the object on August 30th, just a couple weeks ago. NASA's scout system, which monitors newly discovered asteroids and comets, as part of this center for Near Earth Object Studies, S, abbreviated C, NEOs. So whenever you hear NEO, that's near Earth object, and without reference to the matrix at least. And it indicated that it had an unusual orbit. shortly thereafter so it confirmed it and let's check out this hyperbolic

Starting point is 00:05:32 orbit of the comet credit ESA and EEOCC so with this object it's it's moving pretty fast as well as you know similar to the Omoauma muamua of 2017 and back then you know scientists like I said the acceleration was unable to be accounted for so it could have been you know, a natural object, just aimlessly wandering and captured by the sun's gravity, but it was propelled in a manner and on a trajectory with an acceleration that was more than solely our sun would be able to impart on it. So we thought maybe the more speculative scientists thought maybe it might have been a solar sail, which you could imagine,

Starting point is 00:06:24 I always say that, don't it? It works just like a spacecraft with large reflective sails that capture the momentum of light emitted from the sun to propel the spacecraft forward. So it's just so fascinating because, you know, I'm a firm believer that there's definitely other life out there. I guess the real question is whether it's intelligent life. but when you consider the sheer number of stars i mean just obviously we can't reach without some

Starting point is 00:07:02 metaphysical method of propulsion or locomotion we can't reach other galaxies but within our own galaxy we certainly can and with billions of stars we have in our galaxy and the millions of years um you know billions but at least millions of years that most of the current star have been fully formed with exoplanets, you know, planets around it, inhabitable zones, is, it's almost unlikely that there isn't some form of intelligent life. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to start trying to speculate. you know that other at least probes if not objects with actual you know piloted by actual other beings no doubt it would be other probes but maybe that's just us anthropomorphizing natural objects

Starting point is 00:08:07 so that's why i like i really enjoy speculating about this because you know the possibility isn't so remote as some people would imagine. So a few days after all these people started looking at this thing, famed astronomer Marco Micheli from the ESA European Space Agency's near Earth Object Center, he started looking at it and conducted several measurements on the object's position using data provided by the Canada, France, Hawaii telescope. That's great. These people are so coordinated.

Starting point is 00:08:54 In Manukia, Hawaii, the ESA is now analyzing available data and planning more observations. That didn't tell us anything, did it? But it does say Michelle explained that, you know, he, as a scientist, he doesn't want to make speculations, so he is going to,

Starting point is 00:09:13 not put his foot in his mouth. He's not going to say anything that he doesn't have sufficient evidence to support at the moment. He says he wants to really pin down the origin with more observations that will either prove the current thesis that it is interstellar. So that's currently only a thesis based on the about 40, I guess about 40 degree can be easier to see.

Starting point is 00:09:45 angle of inclination towards from the ecliptic which is the plane that most of our most planets orbit on So that that kind of two-dimensional plane you know This thing isn't coming from I guess most comments most comets and other objects orbiting our sun lie within a reasonable variation of that that plane this one is coming from a pretty steep angle so that's the first big big tip and then of course the acceleration once they are able to track the motion of it in the future trajectory of it more clearly they're going to be able to determine whether it's truly interstellar if it's I guess by narrowing out the possibilities of it being in a

Starting point is 00:10:40 stable orbit around the sun currently looks like it has a hyperbolic Corbett, which from your high school math, you should remember, those are open ellipses. Elypses that don't have a, I guess, what is it, the foci are like outside of the ellipse. Or maybe the other foci out of the two is at like an infinite distance. So normal ellipse has, you guys can see that. has two fosite right there a circle is where the fosite are on top of one another superimposed so it's a perfect there are all points on the perimeter of the circular equidistant from the fosy and I believe a hyperbola is or hyperbolic

Starting point is 00:11:53 orbit is open ellips in the sense that the other foci is infinitely far away. So it doesn't really have a closed orbit, but it's the part that does wrap around the one foci, which would be our sun, I believe, is predictable based on these hyperbolic equations that we know about.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Math, in other words, does predict the orbit with the gravity gravitational forces of the sun as far as we know. At this point, what is known is that C-219Q4 Borosov is a relatively large and active comet that measures a few kilometers in diameter. It's expected to make its closest approach or perihelion to the sun in early December

Starting point is 00:12:59 reaching a distance of about 186 million miles, which is roughly about twice the distance as we are from the sun, on average. This distance will place it outside of Mars's orbit, which means technically it's not a near-Earth object, but it's not going to stop us from looking at it. It's actually going to be in the solar system for a long time, or it's trip, rather through the solar system won't be brief so we'll have plenty of time to look at it it let's see it looks like the object will peak in brightness in mid-December of 2019 and continue to be observable with moderate-sized telescopes until

Starting point is 00:13:58 April of 2020 after that it will only be observer observe a bowl with larger professional telescopes all the way through October of 2020. Go back, right back into interstellar outer space. December 8 2019 is its perihelian, or closest approach to the sun. The comet's current velocity is actually pretty high. It's a 93,000 miles an hour, which is well above the typical velocities of objects orbiting the sun at that distance. We can maybe imagine if it was 45, you know, maybe 60, 70,000 miles an hour or something like that.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Entered the ecliptic plane at roughly a 40 degree angle. It was established as being a commentary due to its fuzzy appearance, which generally indicates gaseous, kind of an envelope surrounding it. Generally comets have a central icy body that's producing a gasious, a kind of an envelope surrounding it. a surrounding cloud of dust and particles as it approaches the sun of course that heats up and then once it gets was it close to you know mars i don't know exactly when you know it generally starts outgassing but once it hits the inner solar system you know passing within the boundary of jupiter's orbit generally outgassing occurs and that is exactly what it sounds like that like but the crazy part is well the interesting part about umuamua was that it didn't

Starting point is 00:16:03 outgas it wasn't observed to be the again there's a couple things that just added up to make it really interesting among its speed and steep approaching angle was the lack of outgassing it wasn't like typical comments that have frozen barrier of you know ice and other solids frozen solids that encompass it when it's far enough

Starting point is 00:16:37 and that heat up and expel away from it you know very visibly and observably it yeah just it didn't have any barrier so that was pretty cool that you know this thing didn't have any ice on it which either meant I guess it was ridiculously old or it was just kind of an anomaly to astronomers as far as we knew.

Starting point is 00:17:03 So right now it looks like although it might be interstellar it actually appears to have that outer coating of ice. Observations completed by Karen Meach and her team at the University of Hawaii indicate the comet nucleus is somewhere between 1.2 and 10 miles. in diameter astronomers will continue to collect observations to further characterize the comet's physical properties size and rotation and in general trajectory as well so over here on universe today it's interesting what did outlets what information they choose to share and speculate on and what information they just kind of don't worry about so assuming C 2019 Q4 is a comet it will begin to out gas once it reaches the closest

Starting point is 00:18:04 approach to the Sun all the frozen volatile water carbon dioxide methane ammonia will sublimate be released astronomers will be able to confirm then that the object actually is a comet based on the halo tail that will result so right now I guess they'll be able to when they do that especially when it's lit up they'll be able to analyze it spectroscopically and they'll be able to determine based on the based on the emission lines of the certain wavelengths of light that are either absorbed or emitted when interacting with light will be able to to determine the chemical

Starting point is 00:18:55 composition and see whether it looks drastically foreign or is fits you know a pre-existing category of what comets generally fall into so I guess right now that's all to say that we actually don't know whether it's a comment or not I was under the impression reading the other one I was reading was the JPL dot nassah.gov article what's a title newly discovered comet is likely interstellar visitor so it's likely they're reaching out to speculate on that so because it's going to be within about two a u's astronomical units from the sun they expect outgassing because generally anything that comes within three AUs or about 20, 270 million, right?

Starting point is 00:19:53 That's nine times three million miles, because we're 93 million miles from the sun. Anything within that generally starts to out gas. Anything outside of that, generally as far as comets go, stays cold enough not to produce a tail, comet tail from gas. And this is where Omoa-Mua started actually confounding scientists, because it didn't out gas.

Starting point is 00:20:19 It, despite reaching a distance of, a really close distance because it was actually within the orbit of Mercury, I believe. So 38 million kilometers or 23 million miles from the sun. That's ridiculously close, and it didn't out gas at all. So that's another thing again that was really, really interesting. you managed to accelerate an umu-o-mo-mo-m-o now it came in and i'm sure i'll show you a uh a nice schematic or whatever or a diagram but so there's earth mars and then way out here so here and the inside here oh mu-o-mo-o-moa is mercury earth or venus earth and mars and way out here it's gonna be Jupiter oh mu mu came in ridiculously close and they think

Starting point is 00:21:38 this C 2019 is gonna be a little bit further away you know twice the distance from the sun as Earth is so a mu-moo is is really something something and that's what's so fascinating about it it's just it wasn't consistent with any other previously observed comments of course we've only been looking at comets in this much detail you know maybe 40 years now maybe i don't know but um muamua mua definitely was leading a lot of scientists to believe to consider it it being of artificial origin or at the very least a celestial object that we've never encountered yet. And this is what makes interstellar objects such a prize to win.

Starting point is 00:22:50 It's almost the essence of science, is discovering new things, new phenomena. So it's little wonder why scientists are excited for another interstellar visitor. It's also why many are looking at low-cost, rapid deployment concepts for spacecraft that could actually rendezvous, again, rendezvous with and investigate the object. So again that's a little nod to rendezvous with Rama, which I would highly

Starting point is 00:23:19 recommend you guys read if you aren't a science fiction like that. It's a really cool concept. I really enjoyed it. And it was exactly about that interstellar spaceship without even giving anything away because there were a lot of deeper, more complex concepts in the book. The basic premise was that an interstellar, clearly artificial object, not natural object, was coming through the system, and they noticed its change in acceleration to slow down. So obviously right away they knew it wasn't natural. And so they, I guess humans in the book were advanced enough to be able to go rendezvous with it.

Starting point is 00:24:06 And the craft, I forget why it was. the connection with Indian, you know, the Indian nation, but they called it Rama based on a famous Indian name. And they, yeah, they rendezvoused with it, went inside of it, discovered that it was very inhabitable and very, you know, oddly hospitable to human existence, to the point where it had an atmosphere that was perfectly attuned to what humans would need and come to find out, well, I don't want to spoil it, I guess, from there, but that's the basic premise, is that they get on this ship and the book is an exploration of, you know, what this thing could be and what the purpose of it might be,

Starting point is 00:25:01 and what the cost of interacting with it might be as well. In a few years, if we happen to have another visitor, the ESA European Space Agency's comet interceptor is a mission that is specifically designed to link up with some of these interstellar you know odd angle approaching objects the mission is part of a cosmic vision program the USA's long-term vision for long-term vision for space exploration that includes fast class missions capable of rendezvous with transient phenomena like comets. The common interceptor proposal inspired by Oumuuma Mua.

Starting point is 00:25:52 So this is, ah man, it's so interesting what sets things in motion, you know? Like, what if they are aliens and they are definitely making calculated flybys of our solar system? They're like, oh, okay, well, when we do it, they had an idea that maybe they would accelerate certain aspects. of our exploration of space if they peaked our interest because they know hey we are curious by nature maybe they're playing chess playing the long game with us the interceptors inspired by Oumulu envisions three spacecraft that will be the first to visit a comet or interstellar object as it begins making its way into the inner solar system in any case

Starting point is 00:26:50 should further observations show that C-2019 Q4 is indeed interstellar in its origin, it'll mean that our solar system has been visited at least by at least two interstellar objects within as many years. And so if they're not artificial it would at least also indicate that these types of objects are a lot more common than we would also have thought. Business insider now to see if we They might have got any better scoop. Another name for the C-2019 Q4 Borosov comment is GB 00234.

Starting point is 00:27:46 00-234. So I guess, you know, if we're being scientists about this, we must, we got to consider. I'll do an update video. I just wanted to make a video about this because, It's just something I really enjoy speculating about. And, you know, now more than ever, I mean, with every increasing year, it's more likely that we're gonna be visited,

Starting point is 00:28:20 more likely that we're gonna be able to observe any visitors, any faraway visitors coming at us. I mean, with the first radio projection in outer space, you know, radio waves, you know, maybe they might be too, dim from distant stars but nearby stars they might have picked up you know 50 years ago some of the 1930s 40s and 50s broadcasts in the space and you know maybe nuclear explosions make certain waves and pulses that instruments specifically designed to perceive it may have picked up so who knows you know I I think the possibilities are limitless on this one I mean overall yeah we could be this vulnerable creature calling out into the dark jungle you know waiting to be preyed upon or we could evolve into and hopefully make contact with benevolent species that has at a certain point

Starting point is 00:29:35 put irrational aggression and tribalism behind them or at least sublimated it within themselves and I think that's probably the more likely approach is that people just wised up and were able to cultivate societies and cultures with people that have much more self-control

Starting point is 00:30:03 you know where self-discipline in self-knowledge is the standard rather than the rare exception as it is on earth so this is exciting yet yet again you know within two years just such a short time span too in between visits it's pretty cool I mean if it's genuinely an artificial object being sent to probe and in you know run or uh as a reconnaissance mission it's more than just exciting that's like paradigm shifting it's it's on the order with religious spiritual revelatory significance because the day we find out that we're not the only intelligent beings or you know the only life in the universe we I think it's going to be a big wake-up call and me personally I think I think the internet is first prototypes the first inklings of a human brain as one you know the the the dynamics and complexities of the interactions of billions of different individuals to make ideas and memes and in movements swell and sway and

Starting point is 00:31:40 ebb and flow and emerge out of seeing chaos is it's something we have to study but it's also indicative of you know our values as a species you know on earth I mean how we treat each other what news we pay attention to what bullshit we're able to filter out because there's a lot of it we got to wade through being on the internet um and more most importantly I would say the re what responsibilities each of us are willing to take on that we previously didn't have the knowledge of, of requiring, you know, I mean, the fact that we are so much more connected with all the atrocities and all the evil that's going on in the world nowadays, more than ever, whereas, you know, it's just an

Starting point is 00:32:36 constantly incoming stream of if we want to, we can shut it off if we want, but of news, from everywhere in the world, most places at least, that aren't under a government firewall, you know, a lockdown. It's a responsibility to, you know, for everybody each drop in the bucket to make that water crystal clear or, you know, some cesspool that none of us want to live in. So I think it's a, you know, we're in the midst of a turning point, just like the French Revolution and, or at least on a broader scale, the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, they didn't call it that when they were in it, but now looking back from a couple hundred years in the future, we can recognize there were certain undercurrents, certain pivotal people that, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:31 propelled civilization as a whole in a, you know, certain directions. So this is just one of the many things that, you know, makes me. very interested and I don't know very hopeful that you know we're not just aimlessly nihilistically floating in this universe waiting to die it's like we have no idea what's out there we have no idea what the fundamental substrate of the universe is how life originated on earth or how complex life even started manifesting itself we have no idea you know how where morality came from we we're still figuring ourselves out we need to take a mirror up and it's to to ourselves in a way

Starting point is 00:34:24 that's what the internet does and that's what something like this would be a wake-up call to do certainly look at ourselves and say wow what does a truly alien being observed looking down on earth you know as Carl Sagan takes that view as he often did it was such a brilliant move on his part when the Voyager spacecraft was passing past Saturn. He had them turn their thrusters on and reposition the spacecraft, so rotate it, reorient it, so that it looked back at Earth from Saturn. And what he saw was a pale blue dot.

Starting point is 00:35:07 And he has this beautiful thing that I'm sure a lot of you might have heard, but uh you know to crudely poorly paraphrase it it was saying that everything that it ever happened on earth all the evil all the bloodshed all the revelations all the the miracles all the every life you know all the people we worship all the people we resent and revile all the the beauty everything has happened on that pale little speck in this you know only a couple pixels wide in this panoramic from behind the rings of Saturn and it was a beautiful it was a very sobering moment to look at ourselves from that perspective and I don't know why this is turning into a huge speech so

Starting point is 00:36:14 I just get really jacked up about these things. I really enjoy you know learning about these new things and and I'm excited about where where this is going and even if this isn't an interstellar object from other intelligent life it's just one step towards knowing that much more about the universe the dark infinite vastness outside our little

Starting point is 00:36:46 campfire in the forest that we call the universe. I hope you guys enjoyed this. I certainly did. It was a little more off the cuff than I wanted it to be, but hopefully I can edit it down to make it a little more intelligible. Our second interstellar visitor in as many years. So let me know if you guys what you think about it, or if you have any more information about it. Definitely let me know. And so needless to say I'm pretty pumped about this. Thanks for watching.

Starting point is 00:37:23 And I hope you guys sleep well. I hope you have a great tomorrow. I'll see you next time.

Let's Find Out - Another Interstellar Object? (C/2019 Q4 BORISOV) | ASMR

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