(ORDO NEWS) — On November 26, 2014, the asteroid 2015 BZ509 (Bee-Zed) with a diameter of about three kilometers was discovered in orbit of Jupiter.
It seems nothing strange at first glance, but Bee-Zed attracted the attention of astronomers for at least two reasons:
- Bee-Zed shows retrograde rotation;
- Bee-Zed is older than the solar system.
How did it happen that an asteroid lives in the solar system that is older than the sun itself? This can only be explained by the fact that Bee-Zed is an interstellar object formed in some other corner of the Universe long before the appearance of our star.
“It is fair to say that Bee-Zed is the oldest known object in the solar system. The available data indicate that the asteroid was formed hundreds of millions of years before the birth of the Sun, but then was “abducted” by the gravitational forces of a young star and by chance ended up in the orbit of Jupiter, “commented astrophysicist Fati Namuni.
In the distant past, star clusters were denser, and there was a regular “exchange” of objects between stars. Most likely, Bee-Zed was a wanderer asteroid, and when he flew to the solar system, he was immediately “abducted”.
“The Bee-Zed discovery suggests that there may be thousands of similar interstellar objects in the solar system. If we have the opportunity to explore at least one of them from the closest possible distance, then the universe will remain a little less mysterious, ”said Helena Morais, an astronomer from Brazil.
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