Thanks for sharing your expertise! What really bends my mind is the relative speeds involved. Reddit's /r/space has a great visual[1] which depicts it as basically going straight through our solar system, only bending slightly as it passes Sol. This is only possible if the object moving at 68 km/s is also moving sideways at 230 km/s so as to match our galactic orbit, and moving up at a mind-boggling 600 km/s (relative to CMB). This is all basic stuff of course, but something about having the object actually pass by us is making it more real than usual...

Hell, maybe it's only orbiting the galaxy at a leisurely 160 km/s, and from its perspective we're a spinning disc of chaos zipping past it for the first time in a few million years! I don't even know how I would start to analyze its orientation in relation to the galactic center, but I'll be keeping this as my little "headcannon" until proven wrong, that's for sure.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1lpw4as/new_interste...