So far, astronomers have only managed to spot three real interstellar travelers passing through our Solar System: ‘Oumuamua back in 2017, comet 2I/Borisov in 2019, and the more recent discovery, 3I/ATLAS in 2025. A new research study tries to model how such objects move and what kind of risks they could pose to Earth. Even though these events are incredibly rare — NASA has already said that 3I/ATLAS isn’t any threat at all — the researchers still noticed a few interesting patterns. According to their analysis, most interstellar objects seem to come roughly from the galactic plane and from the direction the Sun is moving through space.
Trying to Estimate Impact Patterns
In the new work, a team from Michigan State reportedly simulated around 10¹⁰ hypothetical interstellar objects (ISOs). Out of those, nearly 10⁴ ended up crossing Earth’s orbit in their models. What they noticed is that possible impacts are twice as likely from two specific directions: the solar apex (the direction of the Sun’s motion) and the galactic plane. The slower objects stand out the most because the Sun’s gravity can snag them more easily.
Their simulation also suggests that—if an impact ever happened—strikes would probably occur more often at lower latitudes, meaning closer to the equator, and slightly more in the northern hemisphere. The researchers stress they’re not predicting any actual impact rate here; the idea is simply to map out general risk patterns that future sky surveys can compare against.
What We Know About These Visitors
Interstellar objects are essentially space rocks or comet-like bodies that zip through our Solar System after wandering from elsewhere in the galaxy. We’ve only identified a couple so far — ‘Oumuamua and Borisov — and even those were faint and hard to track. Scientists think many more must have come and gone unnoticed over the last 4.6 billion years. One estimate says that maybe one to ten ISO-sized objects (around 100 meters across) have actually hit Earth in that enormous time span.
Some researchers even think that extremely ancient craters, like South Africa’s Vredefort structure, could potentially have been caused by an interstellar impact, although that is still debated. Space agencies continue to remind the public that these objects behave just like normal comets; there’s no evidence they are anything unusual or artificial. Overall, the odds of an ISO hitting Earth anytime soon are considered extraordinarily tiny — so tiny that astronomers say it’s basically impossible within a single human lifetime.