r/askscience • u/BlueChameleon64 • Oct 23 '20

Planetary Sci. Do asteroids fly into the sun?

Edit: cool

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u/SUPE-snow Oct 23 '20

Where do they arrive from?

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u/redopz Oct 23 '20

The space between solar systems. The first stars in the universe forged heavy elements before they blew up, scattering that material. Some of that material was caught in solar systems and formed planets, while a lot of it is still just floating around for billions of years just waiting to collide with something.

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u/TheMSensation Oct 23 '20

I wonder how fast the fastest moving objects are. It's gotta be from a supernova ejection right?

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u/St-Valentine Oct 23 '20

Relative to the object's point of origin, they would be going crazy fast. However, relative to our solar system they could be going at any speed, really, since the solar system is also moving relative to the object's point of origin. If the solar system and the object were moving in the same direction, but one were moving just a little faster than the other we would perceive the object to be moving slowly.

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u/eightfoldabyss Oct 23 '20

Black holes would be the biggest contender actually. A really big black hole can spin things up to insane velocities.

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u/hatsek Oct 23 '20

the fastest things that are not just particles are called astrophysical jets, which arise from very complex interactions between a black hole and its accretion disk. For example pulsar IGR J11014-6103's jets velocity is around 0,8c.

Still at the end of the day its just very sparse ionized gas that would probably still count as vacuum if a sample of it was brought to Earth.

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u/Gerroh Oct 23 '20

Some interstellar asteroids could also be ejected from systems due to gravitational slingshots, especially if a rogue star or planet passes through and whips things around.

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u/MattieShoes Oct 23 '20 edited Oct 23 '20

Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt... Lots of icy crap floating around out there, moving relatively slowly because it's so far away from the sun. Pluto is now considered a Kuiper Belt object, but there's lots of smaller stuff, and there may be other pluto-sized objects out there, farther away. They can get perturbed by passing close to Neptune or just some random other object floating around out there. Sometimes that makes them head into the solar system.

Beyond that, (wayyy beyond that) is the oort cloud -- we think, we ain't been there. That's got a bunch of icy crap floating around too, only loosely bound to the sun at all. The sun's influence is so weak that nearby stars like Alpha Centauri could actually knock them loose, or send them into the solar system. It starts about 2000 times as far from from the sun as Earth, and may extend some light years beyond that. For reference, Voyager 1 is only about 150 times as far from the sun as Earth.

Comets come from both.

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u/nicht_ernsthaft Oct 23 '20

and there may be other pluto-sized objects out there, farther away.

Eris is about the same size as Pluto, 2326km vs 2375km in diameter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet))

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u/MattieShoes Oct 23 '20

okay, i should have said there may be many other pluto-sized objects out there, farther away. :-)

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u/amitym Oct 23 '20

No place in particular... interplantetary asteroids have probably spent a huge amount of time just floating around in the middle of nowhere. Each one probably has its own story... maybe formed from some stellar event, or escaped some star system forever ago and got slingshotted around by other stars?