📺 🤲 😬 Alien Centaurs 💰 🥠 🤾🏾

Currently, when the planets open in packs at other stars , and the earthlings sent the first starships , it seems that our home solar system is already well studied and familiar. However, at times there is news that if they do not undermine the foundations of a worldview, then at least give rise to the exclamation “a-hri-net!” It was this reaction that caused me a new study , according to which in the Solar System there are two dozen cosmic bodies arriving from other stars.

The classical theory of the formation of the solar system suggests that all the bodies that revolve around the sun were formed from one gas and dust disk. The gas-dust disk itself is the remnants of the star formation process that gave rise to our luminary. The disk is formed from a protoplanetary cloud, under the action of centrifugal force acquiring a flat shape, therefore all planets, large satellites and most asteroids have orbits close to the plane of the solar equator. This plane is called the ecliptic plane, and it is believed that the Earth lies exactly on it, and other planets have some deviation.

In asteroids, the deviation from the ecliptic plane is greater, because they experience more disturbing influences, primarily from the gravity of the planets. Comets, on the other hand, fly from the far outskirts of the Solar System, where they were thrown out at the stage of planet formation from a gas-dust disk. However, in addition to the stone asteroids of the inner solar system, and long-period ice comets, today there are several families of different cosmic bodies that cannot be attributed to any familiar class.

For example, Pluto and several other fairly large bodies are now considered dwarf planets, most of which are in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, along with many relatively small bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Further away from the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt lies a scattered disk, and even further, the Oort Cloud, and closer than the orbit of Neptune around the Sun, the so-called. "Centaurs." Centaurs are a special group of small cosmic bodies that only conditionally fit the definition of asteroids, because they contain a significant amount of water and other ice, and when approaching the Sun they are surrounded by a coma, like comets. They are not similar to comets, because their orbit is not very elliptical, and its nearest point lies far from the Sun, and the average density of these bodies is closer to the stone than to ice.The sizes of some centaurs are also not cometary at all - a few pieces are more than 200 km across, which allows them to claim the title of dwarf planets.

The gray ones are the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter; green - centaurs; orange - scattered disk; blue - Edgeworth-Kuiper belt.

Some evidence suggests that the dwarf planet Ceres , which is now located in the main asteroid belt, could be a centaur. Although the scientists themselves have not yet fully decided which bodies to attribute to the centaurs, the general idea is that they are small cosmic bodies whose orbits lie within the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune or a little further.

None of the centaurs are photographed close, which adds mystery even more. But it is known that some have their own ring system. The only thing we have, in addition to observations from the Earth, is the satellite images of Saturn's Phoebe, which, presumably, is a captured centaur.

Despite the unusual centaurs, out of four hundred known, today we’ll talk about only 17, but the most amazing ones. One centaur with the unpronounceable name Kaepaokavela behaves so unusual that in 2018, scientists suspected its alien origin. Its orbit is quite close to Jupiter, but unlike most bodies in the solar system, the circulation is retrograde, i.e. he flies towards all the asteroids that are in those places.

Astronomers tried to simulate his future and past in order to understand how he managed to acquire such orbital characteristics. To do this, we conducted a simulation of a million scenarios that differed in insignificant variations of gravitational parameters. It turned out that about half of the scenarios lead to the ejection of a centaur from the solar system in several million years. The second half of the scenarios leads to its collapse on the Sun in the same time. And only 46 scenarios showed the possibility of maintaining throughout the life of the solar system. But these scenarios included the capture of Kaepaokavela by the Sun from some other planetary system. That is, there were indirect signs of the extrasolar origin of this centaur.

Inspired by their first success, astronomers decided to run a simulation of other unusual centaurs and several trans-Neptune objects whose orbit is almost perpendicular to the ecliptic plane or retrograde around the sun. It turned out that either they all flew from outside the Solar System in the last 100 million years, and in the next 100 million fly away (or fall to the Sun), or they were captured 4.5 billion years ago from some other star.

The recent capture option (100 million years by space standards - this is recent) is considered unlikely by scientists it involves the constant renewal of the centaur family by extrasolar objects. There remains an ancient capture and gradual evolution of the orbit.

In any scenario, it can be assumed that to study spacecraft other solar systems, now we do not need to leave our own. This opens up opportunities for modern astronautics, which is still far from near-light speeds , in the implementation of interstellar expeditions. But now you can go to the object that he himself made such an expedition.

Today, two cosmic bodies that have recently flown through our system from interstellar space have been discovered: asteroid 1I / Oumuamua and comet 2I / Borisov. But they noticed them too late, and they will fly away too quickly to have time to send at least a small research probe to them. The situation with centaurs is much simpler, although their orbit also does not promise an easy flight.
The attention of modern astronautics is directed to closer bodies: Mercury, the Moon, Mars, asteroids, Jupiter, but if you aim at more complex tasks, then achieving an extra-solar centaur is one of the most worthy. The closest program that looks like flying to these “aliens” is NASA Lucy.

This probe should go to the Trojans of Jupiter - another family of asteroids that is gravitationally connected with the giant planet. Lucy herself will not be able to examine Kaepaokavela in more detail, but an apparatus of such complexity would have been possible if it had been launched for this purpose.

Alien Centaurs

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