This one is coming in fast, it has an eccentricity of over 6 with the current fits. For point of reference, 1I and 2I have eccentricities of 1.2 and 3.3.
Right now it is mostly just a point on the sky, it is difficult to tell if it is active (like a comet) yet. If it is not active, IE: asteroid like, then the current observations put it somewhere between 8-22km in diameter (this depends on the albedo of the surface). From what we know, we would expect it to likely be made up of darker material meaning given that range of diameters it is more likely to be on the larger end. However if it is active, then the dust coming off can make it appear much larger than it is. As it comes in closer to the sun and starts to warm up it may become active (or more active if its already doing stuff).
It will not pass particularly close to any planet. It will be closest to the sun just before Halloween this year at 1.35 au, moving at 68 km/s (earth orbits at 29-30 km/s). It is also retrograde (IE, it is moving in the opposite direction of planetary motion), for an interstellar object this is basically random chance that this is the case.
The next couple of weeks will be interesting for a bunch of people I know.
Source: Working on my PhD in orbital dynamics and formerly wrote the asteroid simulation code used on several NASA missions: https://github.com/dahlend/kete
In practice I'm not seeing much of a difference. Maybe it is just being in ML, where if you wait for conferences you're far behind. If a paper is that shitty, it is usually very apparent. Like if a paper isn't in latex you know... I mean there's a lot of garbage in conferences and journals too, I just haven't found it to be a meaningful signal.
And it is still silly that people call it "peer review." Peer review is not 3-4 randos briefly glancing my work in an adversarial setting who say my work is not novel because it is the same as some unrelated work that they didn't read either; peer review is the grad student building on top of my work, peer review is lucidrains rewriting my work from scratch, it is Ross Wightman integrating it into timm and retraining, it is the forks that use my work for projects (hobby or professional). Peer review is peers looking and reviewing. More peer review happens on Twitter than these conferences. You can say these conferences and journals are a form of peer review, but we gotta stop saying that just because something is a preprint that it isn't peer reviewed. That's just incorrect. Peer review is when peers review.
Right now it is mostly just a point on the sky, it is difficult to tell if it is active (like a comet) yet. If it is not active, IE: asteroid like, then the current observations put it somewhere between 8-22km in diameter (this depends on the albedo of the surface). From what we know, we would expect it to likely be made up of darker material meaning given that range of diameters it is more likely to be on the larger end. However if it is active, then the dust coming off can make it appear much larger than it is. As it comes in closer to the sun and starts to warm up it may become active (or more active if its already doing stuff).
It will not pass particularly close to any planet. It will be closest to the sun just before Halloween this year at 1.35 au, moving at 68 km/s (earth orbits at 29-30 km/s). It is also retrograde (IE, it is moving in the opposite direction of planetary motion), for an interstellar object this is basically random chance that this is the case.
Link to an orbit viewer: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=3I&vi...
The next couple of weeks will be interesting for a bunch of people I know.
Source: Working on my PhD in orbital dynamics and formerly wrote the asteroid simulation code used on several NASA missions: https://github.com/dahlend/kete