Science Alert reports:
In October 19th, 2017, the first interstellar object ever detected flew past Earth on its way out of the Solar System. Less than two years later, a second object was detected, an easily-identified interstellar comet designated as 2I/Borisov.
The appearance of these two objects verified earlier theoretical work that concluded that interstellar objects (ISOs) regularly enter our Solar System.
The question of how often this happens has been the subject of considerable research since then. According to a new study led by researchers from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), roughly seven ISOs enter our Solar System every year and follow predictable orbits while they are here.
This research could allow us to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with one of these objects in the near future.
The research that describes these findings was conducted by multiple researchers from i4is, a non-profit organization dedicated to the realization of interstellar flight in the very near future.
They were joined by researchers from the Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard's Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), the University of Texas at Austin, the Technical University of Munich, and the Observatoire de Paris. READ MORE
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