Title: The Interstellar Visitors

Speaker: Colin Snodgrass，University of Edinburgh

Time: Oct.19, 2026 (Monday) 10:00 am

Venue: Large Meeting Room, 3rd Floor

Tencent Meeting: 925-332-949

Abstract：

The first macroscopic interstellar object (ISO) passing through our Solar System, `Oumuamua, was discovered in 2017 and caused a lot of excitement, due to both its novelty and its unexpected properties. The subsequent two discoveries, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS, appear more like comets. 3I/ATLAS has been observable for most of the last year, and as the first ISO seen in the JWST era has been well studied, and appears to be an ancient object that is significantly older than our Solar System. I will discuss what we have learned about the ISOs seen so far, what the prospects are for this field in the era of Rubin/LSST, and how we could potentially send a spacecraft to see a future visitor up close.

About the speaker：

Colin Snodgrass is Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, and previously worked at The Open University, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, and the European Southern Observatory in Chile. His PhD studies were at Queen’s University Belfast. He is involved with a number of space missions, including the ESA Rosetta, Hera, Ramses and Comet Interceptor missions, but his background is in observational astronomy, and in particular studying comets and asteroids with large optical telescopes.