The New Astronomical Frontier of Interstellar Objects.

Abstract

The upcoming commencement of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will greatly enhance the discovery rate of interstellar objects (ISOs). 'Oumuamua and Borisov were the first two ISOs confirmed in the Solar System, although the first interstellar meteor was detected earlier. We explore the intriguing mass budget of ejected planetesimals implied by the detections of 'Oumuamua and Borisov and explore the expected abundance of ISOs as a function of size in the solar neighborhood. Specifically, we find that a significant fraction of stellar mass must go toward producing ISOs and that ISOs outnumber Solar System objects in the Oort cloud. We consider signatures of ISOs colliding with Earth, the Moon, and neutron stars, as well as the possibility of differentiating ISOs from Solar System objects in stellar occultation surveys, and we show that these methods are observationally feasible. We introduce a test for dynamical anisotropy that is capable of determining the typical ejection speed of ISOs from their parent stars. Finally, we predict a new population of dynamically distinct ISOs originating from stars in the Galactic halo. One of the two branches of the newly established Galileo Project¹ seeks to learn more about the nature of ISOs like 'Oumuamua by performing new searches and designing follow-up observations.