There's a little piece of our neighborhood way, way out where it doesn't belong, at the end of the solar system. Astronomers just discovered this space object unlike any other. It's an ancient chunk of rock and ice, long ago flung into the Oort cloud.

What makes this hunk of rock special is that it's the first piece of matter from Earth's inner solar system neighborhood discovered returning from the Oort cloud. This frosty fringe of our solar system is where most comets call home. Even more intriguingly, "we think it might be fresh Earth-forming material that has been preserved for billions of years," says Karen Meech, the team's leader at the Institute for Astronomy in the University of Hawaii. That would make C/2014 S3 a tantalizing historical fragment without comparison.

"It's possible it will never be observed again."

The strange object—glimpsed during the Pan-STARS astronomical survey and named C/2014 S3—was announced today in the journal Science Advances.

Meech and her colleagues uncovered the origins and composition of this strange rock by analyzing the light coming off it—its dusty fingerprint, if you will—as it ripped past the Sun in 2014. That was their one chance at this, as C/2014 S3 is zooming headlong back to the Oort cloud and can no longer be seen. With a 860-year orbit, "it's possible it will never be observed again," she says.

That fingerprint showed that C/2014 S3 was surprisingly very similar to a common type of asteroid that hails from our solar neighborhood, called an S-type asteroid. Yet one thing about this space traveler was unlike any S-type asteroid you can find today. It still had fragments of ice clinging to it, remnants of the object's creation. For all other S-type asteroids, that ancient ice has long since evaporated, leaving behind a trace of minerals as the only proof it was ever there.

The object in question Institute for Astronomy in the University of Hawaii

Meech considers C/2014 S3 an important discovery for two main reasons. First, its mere existence will help astrophysicists refine their competing theories that explain the evolution of our solar system. Many such models models suggest that early on, the giant gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn migrated to their current orbits, flinging material in their path into the fringes of our solar system. That's how Meech and colleagues believe that C/2014 S3 ended up in the Oort cloud.

However, given the origin and age of the material, C/2014 S3 "is potentially from the very place where Earth was getting its material to grow during its formation," she says. If that's true—and if other objects like C/2014 S3 are found and studied more quickly—scientists might be able to use such objects to answer questions as far reaching as the origin of Earth's organic compounds, and where we got all this water.

"But whats really quite exciting is that there are still new, never-before-seen things in our solar system like this that we're able to discover," Meech says.

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