It's pretty clear to me that these things are just passing through our solar system all of the time, and we're only now getting the resolution to see them go by. It'd be absolutely stupid not to start awarding money for science advancement opportunities to probe them. I talked to a guy yesterday who wants to build an entire fleet of spacecraft designed to study interstellar objects, and then park half of the spacecraft with the Trojan asteroids leading Jupiter, and half with the trailing Trojans. In this .gif, the Trojans are green: Some automated stationkeeping (w/ radar, maybe?) would be required to avoid collisions, yes, but parking in the Trojans lets you then use a quick gravity assist from Jupiter to get outside of the ecliptic plane, where t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶s̶t̶e̶l̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ at gunpoint RAMA a̶r̶e̶ is going to be more often than not. We'll send something up there to, ummmmmm, "make contact" in under ten years, in all likelihood.
"I mean, obviously," he said, temporarily taking off his moonbeam sunshine hat, "the likelihood of natural extrasolar objects ending up passing through the solar system is greater than zero and a better understanding of that process would be a great boon to a panoply of physical sciences. I would presume that interstellar debris would be crucial in collimating our local environment to that of the rest of the local cluster and a sense of the frequency and severity of these encounters would teach us a lot about star formation, the interstellar medium and the basics of..." RAMAAAAA!!!!!! There's obviously a straightforward mathematical relationship between the mass of an object, that object's velocity and the gravitational influence of our solar system such that we could calculate a rough approximation of the composition of the interstellar medium from the survey of similar objects we record. This is the sort of thing that gave us the Hubble constant. And studying these interstellar objects, as well as the increased level of scrutiny we can level at our own solar system using the same tools, is a laudable scientific goal. It will also be better for finding RAMA because a random space rock that happens to course through is vastly less interesting than an extraterrestrial arcology traipsing between Kardashev II civilizations, dammit.
Be careful with dubbing anything big "interstellar medium". We reserve that term for the relatively unperturbed gas between heliospheres. But you guessed it, the interstellar medium is indeed focused by the sun: But that's a stark contrast with these rock or comet-like objects, which are almost indisputably ejected from a solar system sometime during or after the proto-planetary accretion disk stage. It's going to be impossible, right now at least, to demonstrate a relationship between the composition of these things and the makeup of the interstellar medium, because we have effectively a single point measurement of the interstellar medium across an entire galaxy. And remote sensing distant interstellar media is... well, I don't know how you'd do it. I'll think about that. It doesn't radiate, so you'd have to work with something passing through... Ohhh this is fun, thanks
Okay from a lay perspective, though, we've got what we know and we've got what we think, and considering we have yet to conclusively verify the Oort Cloud, any random space chunky with a gnarly trajectory becomes an important subject of scientific experiment. You're right - by "interstellar medium" I mean "shit what ain't from 'round here." This is not the correct use of the term when discussing science but we're talking about RAMA dammit
A Seattle man, who some say has been driven mad by science fiction, is building a particle collider in the attic of a birthing center to begin his search for something he calls the "RAMA" particle.