Avi Loeb

That's the main indicator is the speed.

Yes, because if something moves faster than the escape speed, it couldn't have been bound to the solar system unless there was another object colliding with it that kicked it.

But Oumuamua, for example, came from a completely different direction than the solar system planets, the equator, the plane, the ecliptic.

And so you can easily tell if you go back in time whether the object passed near another one or not.

And in all these cases, the objects were moving very fast outside the solar system.

So they're moving at 60 kilometers per second or so.

And that's like 600 times faster than our fastest racing car.

And by the way, I know that because

a car racer in California decided to put, at the NASCAR car race, decided to put my image along with the image of interstellar objects.

Your face on a race car?

Yes.

And I told him, look, it's a compliment for me.

Of course.

But not a compliment for 3i Atlas, for example, because that one is moving at 600 times faster than your race car.

You know, you can't... So anyway...

The point is that I gave the same task to an AI agent just a few weeks ago, and within 10 minutes, we had a new interstellar meteor that it identified in the same data set of NASA.

So this is different than the one in the Pacific?

Yes, so we have a new one that is 600 kilometers from Peru.

Let's take a quick break, and we'll come back with interstellar objects.

Be right back.