GETTY Alien asteroid from 4.5 BILLION years ago discovered in solar system in major BREAKTHROUGH

Late last year, scientists discovered the asteroid 'Oumuamua which travelled through our solar system after arriving from another star. While the cigar-shaped asteroid passed through the solar system, scientists began theorising that asteroids could have come from far away and then stayed. This has now been confirmed after scientists found a space rock called 2015 BZ509. The asteroid was actually first discovered in 2014, but after four years of tracking it, scientists have been able to determine that the rock arrived in our solar system some 4.5 billion years ago – just as Earth was beginning to form.

C. Veillet/Large Binocular Telescope Observatory Asteroid 2015 BZ509

The asteroid orbits the sun clockwise – the opposite way to all the planets – and is in the same path as Jupiter. Astronomer and cosmologist Fathi Namouni of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France said: "How the asteroid came to move in this way while sharing Jupiter's orbit has until now been a mystery. "If 2015 BZ509 were a native of our system, it should have had the same original direction as all of the other planets and asteroids, inherited from the cloud of gas and dust that formed them.” After running computer simulations on the asteroid, they found that it has been there for 4.5 billion years and it will continue on that path for 43 billion more years – although this will not happen as our sun would have burned out by that point.

Amazing facts about Asteroids Tue, April 4, 2017 The first asteroid was Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system. Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Play slideshow Getty Images 1 of 10 There are Millions of Asteroids in the solar system, usually found in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, however those in that pass the Earth are called Near-Earth objects