Science desk
< September 28	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 29[edit]

second interstellar object[edit]

That a second gravitational wave event was detected soon after the first is not remarkable, because the detector had been recently switched on.

It's more surprising that a second interstellar object is found just two years after the first. Has detection of small Solar System objects become much more sensitive in the last few years? —Tamfang (talk) 06:40, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It might just be that after the first was discovered, other astronomers "jumped on the bandwagon" and began looking for them, too. This would be because they then had proof that such objects exist, and getting funding to look for something we know exists is a lot easier than something that may or may not. SinisterLefty (talk) 06:50, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This case is especially unusual as it was discovered by an amateur astronomer. From our own article, he describes noticing an object moving on a noticeably different trajectory from that of most solar system objects, and chose to study it further. Hunting for new objects involves a lot of time staring at black screens covered in fuzzy white specs, trying to figure out which specs are worth studying, and which even represent real solar system objects. A fleeting object that quickly leaves the frame of view is probably more likely to be ignored. Obviously at least one person decided to try and follow one of them, and maybe we'll get a lot more in the near future. Someguy1221 (talk) 09:53, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Technology advances with greater number of pixels in a sensor, and automated processing pipelines have allowed all sky surveys in recent years that have been able to detect far more changing events. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:48, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed: it's been a steady chain of progress across the smorgasbord of technology: computing horsepower, telescope sensor electronics, statistical processing software - each of these areas has improved year over year.

Particularly, one technology that has grown is data storage. Today, we have the capacity to capture and archive trillions of astronomical observations - and to provide access to that data effortlessly - while in the distant past, even the most thorough scientific archives were much smaller.

For highly-eccentric objects - things that "move through the sky very quickly" - this is pretty important: if you have more photographs, you've got a better chance of spotting one.

As an analogy, read about the early observational history of the object we now know as Pluto: Percival Lowell collected, but never visually inspected, his photographic plates in a process known as "precovery" - the planet had already been spotted by a machine (the photographic telescope apparatus), but no human had noticed it!

Today, we don't rely on a manual process of blink-comparison between a small number of images: we have, so to speak, machine eyes on the sky at all-times, in all quadrants, from multiple angles... and we are only beginning to develop the capacity to store and process the data.

If I had to rank the number-one most important technology change that is improving the detection-threshold for this specific type of observational astronomy, I would say that it's the slow but steady improvement in data warehousing: the boring stuff like faster network-attached storage. Getting more data to more scientists - and their computers - means more scientific discovery can occur. Of course, thousands of ancillary pieces of science and technology also contribute to the progress: from marginal improvements in semiconductor electronics, to the pure theory of numerical methods for statistical analysis, to the seemingly-unrelated day-on-day improvement in our understanding of basic science like chemistry and geology.

Read more on this topic, from JPL's Center for NEO Studies...

Nimur (talk) 15:45, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]