Unusual Asteroid Could Be An Interstellar Guest To Our Solar System

LOADING ERROR LOADING Researchers postulate that a peculiar asteroid spotted near Jupiter is a permanent guest from a completely different solar system. In an article published Monday in the U.K.’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers say their studies indicate that asteroid 2015 BZ509 is actually an “interstellar immigrant” that has been circling the sun ever since our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists Fathi Namouni of Côte d'Azur Observatory in France and Helena Morais of São Paulo State University in Brazil claim asteroid 2015 BZ509 is a guest from an alien solar system that has taken up residence in our own. “But at 4.5 billion years in the past, all solar system objects, planets, asteroids and comets moved exactly in the same direction around the sun. This tells us that the asteroid was not born in the solar system but captured from outside it.” Other astrophysicists have come up with alternate explanations for BZ’s retrograde orbit and suggested, for example, that the object could have come from the Oort Cloud, an icy mass of debris that some astronomers propose exists near the outer reaches of the solar system.