Astronomers have found that renegade objects from alien star systems could be captured by Earth's gravity and linger in orbit around our planet for potentially millions of years. However, most of these objects would likely be too small to detect with current telescopes, according to a new study published May 17 on the preprint server arXiv.
"Objects entering the solar system from the interstellar space outside of it can be trapped into bound orbits around the sun as a result of a close passage to Jupiter," co-author Avi Loeb, a professor of physics at Harvard University, told Live Science in an email. "We investigate the possibility that some of them are captured and become Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)."
These "interstellar interlopers," as the team calls them, would take the form of icy rocks jettisoned from their home star systems before taking up residence in ours. However, Loeb and his colleagues do not rule out the possibility that objects crafted by intelligent aliens could end up in our solar system as well.
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