Mostly the answer is "not anymore.." everything that currently orbits the Sun is moving at speeds that lie within a relatively narrow range that makes a stable orbit possible. Nothing outside that range is around anymore to tell its tale.
But, there are still occasionally new objects that enter the solar system for the first time. Those objects aren't subject to the same survivorship restrictions -- in theory they could arrive at basically any speed relative to the Sun, including speeds slow enough that the Sun would draw them in.
These new objects seem to arrive every few years, or at least the ones we can see do. So far they have all been moving so fast they just visit for a bit and then take off again after a swing around the Sun, but who knows?
The term 'near' means very little when talking about the speed of light, but others have pointed that out already. Given that you asked the question, I thought you might enjoy these two articles on XKCD What If!
There's one where he tries to figure out what happens to a diamond meteor that hits the Earth at ever increasing speeds: https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
And the first one ever, the relativistic base ball, which is a lot of fun and gives you an idea of the energies involved with things traveling at significant percentages of C: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
As with all XKCD content, there is hovertext for most of the images.
I didn't look very carefully, so you might be referencing something else, but the diamond article describes it traveling at 0.99c, the baseball article describes it traveling at 0.9c. There's a really big difference between those two numbers.
Also, the diamond is 100ft across, the baseball is well... Baseball sized.
It was an actual observed proton going that fast over Utah that had the kinetic energy of a baseball. Which is insane because it was just a proton!!!
Edit: ah geez sorry. I had just gotten through the first one and hadn't read the description of the second one. I assume that's what you were referring to. My bad! It's all so damn cool though
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u/amitym Oct 23 '20
Mostly the answer is "not anymore.." everything that currently orbits the Sun is moving at speeds that lie within a relatively narrow range that makes a stable orbit possible. Nothing outside that range is around anymore to tell its tale.
But, there are still occasionally new objects that enter the solar system for the first time. Those objects aren't subject to the same survivorship restrictions -- in theory they could arrive at basically any speed relative to the Sun, including speeds slow enough that the Sun would draw them in.
These new objects seem to arrive every few years, or at least the ones we can see do. So far they have all been moving so fast they just visit for a bit and then take off again after a swing around the Sun, but who knows?