Have we gotten better at detecting these objects in the past 5 years or is the solar system going through a bumpy area of Milky Way lately? We have observed (or I have heard about) many interstellar objects in the past five years than any previous times.
There has been a significant increase in NEO observation projects in the last eight years and there’s one coming online soon that should increase the detection capabilities even more.
Pan-STARRS (discovered 1I/ʻOumuamua), Zwicky Transient Facility (2I/Borisov), and ATLAS (3I/ATLAS) are the major existing projects and the Rubin Observatory/LSST will be a huge upgrade. We’re going to detect a lot more if these objects, especially since a lot of the work of the projects are looking at historical data.
2I/Borisov was not discovered by Zwicky Transient Facility .
The comet was discovered on 30 August 2019 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov at his personal observatory MARGO in Nauchnij, Crimea, using a 0.65 meter telescope he designed and built himself.
That’s interesting. If it was possible to do on a homemade telescope, then why were no interstellar objects discovered before 1A?
The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have been getting steadily cheaper and better, which leads to more amateur comet hunters each watching more sky, which has rapidly improved the odds of catching rare objects.
I'm not sure how the progress of institutional and amateur observations compare. Obviously the big guys benefit from the same technological advancement, but I don't know whether the fraction of new objects discovered by amateurs has been growing or not. I suspect the odds of the first interstellar object being found by an amateur were still pretty long.
Computing Power has increased tremendously, along with the higher resolution of digital imaging technology compared to analog film plates. Sky Survey projects like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have become active in recent years, which generate Terabytes of spectrographic data each night which can be rapidly examined for differences from previous captures. In the past each exposure had to be hand-aligned on a Light table and “flipped” between to spot differences.
From wikipedia: "As of 2025, three interstellar objects have been discovered traveling through the Solar System: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025"
I would guess that observation improves over time. The wikipedia article is fascinating, estimating 10,000 such objects passing within Neptune's orbit in our solar system each day. I think that includes dust and sand sized objects.
It's detection, not a particularly crowded area of space. These rocks are hard to see, and one needs at least 3 observations (in theory, but in practice more) to compute their path and determine that they're extrasolar. Within 5 years we'll probably be detecting several of them a week.
It’s worth noting that we went from wondering if other stars had planets to hitting 6000 detected so far in about four decades with just 33 years since the first discovery of an exoplanet (and 30 years since one was found orbiting a main-sequence star—that first was actually two planets which orbited a neutron star).
A funny overview of the recent history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw
Somewhere in the galaxy, silicon-based lifeforms who enjoy swimming in molten lead have trained their telescopes on our solar system and mapped it. They have assumed all the planets here are incapable of supporting life, except for the second one: It's right in their habitable zone. Their ships are speeding toward Venus as we speak.
If _some_ kind of life is possible in Venus, shouldn't Venus have it?
That's how life works on Earth. If it _can_ live somewhere, it's probably already there. We think that's related to how it can survive and adapt, so it's reasonable to assume other life would be similar in that regard.
Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain any life, it should already be there.
I know it sounds weird. What if life never got there? Well, it had plenty of opportunity. The universe is old and lots of things happened in it already.
Maybe life is a late addition to the universe, and we're one of the first instances of it. Or maybe it's rare, and we're lucky. Both the "life is new" and "life is rare" ideas, however, paint a picture of Earth being a special case somehow. "We are a special case" is not a very satisfying answer though (from the scientific point of view).
> Therefore, by this logic, if Venus is able to sustain any life, it should already be there.
How do you know it's not? Venus is a much more difficult place for us to analyze than say, Mars.
Maybe it is, I don't know.
I was talking about your scenario of space-faring silicon-based life. If Venus can support this different life, then it should be already there.
It's hard enough to find signs of life similar to ours (something familiar, carbon, metabolism), so if there is some completely different life somewhere in the solar system, it's unlikely we would be able to recognize it at first glance. So unlikely, that is almost pointless to postulate its existence.
Therefore, our best shot is to look for life similar to ours (because we know its tells). I think that's where the idea of a habitability zone comes from. It's not excluding the possibility of life existing outside of the zone, it's just making it easier for us to look (because looking everywhere means considering things we can't possibly understand).
That idea has been slightly changed since we started to hypothesize life on moons like Europa and Enceladus though. They are outside the classical habitable zone, but they have other possible means for producing liquid water that don't rely on the heat of a close star (tidal friction and residual core heat).
5 years ago space got a whole force dedicated to it in the US. Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts? The timing is an interesting coincidence if anything.
We know exactly who discovered these objects, what tech they were using, and where the funding came from, and it wasn’t from space force.
"we" does not include me, which is why I posed it as a question, and made the allowance that it's at least an interesting coincidence to me.
I'm not sure why that warrants a flood of downvotes, especially increasing after your message called me out, but hey I guess that's HN now.
FWIW, HN values directness and precision, even in questions. I bet if you'd said "Did increased military spending have anything to do with this?" you'd get a quick answer "no" and few downvotes; but what you actually said was "Perhaps this is the result of an increase in military research efforts" with a question mark on the end, and I expect HN was reacting to that.
Your original question is indistinguishable from a societal suicide cultist "just asking questions" to promote dear leader. There's an endless flood of that, so the best thing to do is downvote (or flag) and move on. Engaging just drives further engagement.