Centaurs

Centaurs: they’ve been with us for a long time Space

Centaurs: they’ve been with us for a long time

We’ve been waiting for extraterrestrial visitors our whole lives – but in reality, they’re already here and have been with us for a long time. No, I don’t mean “Men in Black.” But it’s also not science fiction, it’s the truth. When astronomers discovered 2017 1I/ʻOumuamua, their surprise was enormous: we’d never seen an interstellar object inside our Solar System before. Or had we? We had. For some time, astronomers have known about asteroids that don’t orbit the Sun in the same plane as the planets (the ecliptic), but instead on orbits that are at a greater or smaller…