All about Oumuamua? when it was discovered? Where is Oumuamua now?
A cigar-shaped asteroid. That's what scientists, using the so-called Pan Starrs, which was a fast response telescope used to detect certain objects like comets and asteroids – detected in 2017. It is known today as “Oumuamua”. In the Hawaiian language, 'Oumuamua means “a messenger from afar arriving first”, a reference to its scout-like nature. Years later, we’re still trying to figure out what exactly this was. A lot of people claim that Oumuamua was something belonging to an alien civilization, maybe a sort of alien spaceship. But, we think this is not the case! weird interstellar object! Today we might actually finally have a solution, a very sound scientific solution that does not involve aliens, but before we, we wanted to mention the fact that we had some controversy about the origins of this object and without going into details about the object itself. The only reasonable explanation to all of this is well, unfortunately, for the lack of better words, scientific ego. Of course, everybody loves the idea of wanting to be that one scientist discovering something absolutely extraordinary somewhere out there and being that first person to mention it to provide proof for it and to then basically be in the spotlight because of this. Now, unfortunately, in science this happens quite a lot and also, unfortunately in science, because of this, there are some problems. One of the main problems is that this causes the public to lose fate and to lose any kind of confidence in scientific discoveries in the scientific community, and in scientists in general. Second of all, the problem with this mentality is that this creates a kind of a race to try to be that one person to discover something incredible so that you can be in the spotlight. (i.e. you make discoveries, you make money!) This also often ends up in people making a lot of mistakes in the process, and then basically becoming a kind of pariah, or just losing their job completely.
Now that’s not exactly what we wanted to focus on, but it’s really important to understand one thing: when trying to figure out what we’re looking at, it’s super important in science not to jump to conclusions, especially when those conclusions can be explained by any other reasonable means. We all really want to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence and a lot of us actually are convinced. The aliens are probably somewhere out there, but trying to explain a phenomenon that can be explained in different ways by basically implying that it’s probably alien intelligence is actually a somewhat irresponsible thing to do, at least for scientists. It is totally okay if you’re not a scientist, but if you are in a scientific community it is extremely important to be very prudent in investigating your claims, and in trying to avoid turning a hypothesis into an actual fact because that’s what’s been happening with a lot of new discoveries in the last few decades. But anyway, despite all of this, we still wanted to talk about this object, because a new paper in some sense is kind of brilliant and it’s actually extremely interesting to read what the scientists had to say.
First of all, let’s actually talk about the Oumuamua and its shape, because what papers have been showing you so far is this really unusual cigar-like shape, but a lot of scientists do not believe this was the shape at all. So what's its shape? A lot of new studies determined that the shape probably looks something similar to a kind of a flat pancake in shape. So we know that this object came into the solar system, moving at a velocity slightly lower than would be expected. What this implies, according to the scientists, is that this object probably wasn’t really traveling for a very long time across interstellar space. The suggestion here is that it’s maybe about 500 million years, possibly even less than that. We also believe that it originally entered the outer solar system roughly around the year 1605. Oumaumua was approaching the solar system, while British captain George Weymouth set sail from England in search of lands where it is possible to found a Catholic colony, explored Nantucket Island and the Maine coast. His expedition report inspired the founding of the Virginia Company, a corporation with commercial interests in the New World. Also, it is the same year in which was discovered dust plot in London.
Will Oumuamua ever leave the solar system? Anyway, Oumuamua is probably going to officially leave the solar system by the year 2430, moving at speed of about 26.3 kilometers per second now. One of the more unusual features of this object was, of course, its light curve. For some reason, this is what the scientists observed, which they interpreted as the object tumbling around, as it was basically moving through the solar system. But the actual shape has been debated ever since. At first, it was a cigar shape...later on, scientists actually worked out that it was probably more of a disc shape, but so far nothing really makes this object “unusual”. I mean, it is simply an asteroid, isn't it? Well, yes, But something happened that the scientists didn’t expect as they started to observe this object leaving the solar system. They realized that there was a slight deviation between the observed orbit and the expected orbit now for conics. But again, that’s actually totally not unusual. We expect the comets, as they emit a lot of material from their core generally start to change their orbit and trajectory, and usually, this is correlated with the commentary tale itself. But what made Oumuamua different is that the cometary tale was not observed! And so the trajectory here was changing, yet at the same time, the tail was not observed anywhere. How could it be possible? Scientists tried to explain this behavior, and that’s where this explanation came from and honestly, at least scientifically, this still doesn’t make sense, because there are so many other better explanations.
In the paper, there are really only two main assumptions that are being made, one of them is that it was definitely a pancake shape and the second explanation was that it is not made from the same material as typical comets we detect such as the famous 2020 Neowise comet. In fact, a comet is usually made out of different frozen gases, all sorts of water, ices, and also carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. A lot of these gases are visible and also emits certain types of colors, as we look at them when the sun illuminates them from the distance. But we also know that there are a lot of objects out there in the outer solar system, such as, for example, objects in the same vicinity and in the same orbit as Pluto. They actually are made out of something different, something that gives Pluto a beautiful reddish color. A lot of the red color we see on the surface is nitrogen ice, and that’s something that evaporates very differently from the material that usually is present in most comets. In other words, what the scientists in this paper implied was that it was actually a chunk of nitrogen ice most likely separated from some distant pluto-like object in another star system, or in other words, it was basically a chunk of exoplanetary, Pluto, or exopluto planet. So of course, it was something “alien”, in the sense that It came from another world, but nothing more! Anyway, this happened possibly about 400 to 500 million years ago, as something collided with a distant pluto-like object in another star system and essentially this really large piece eventually escaped into the outer star system or into the interstellar space.
Now originally, this chunk was probably more circular in shape, but with time, because of the way that nitrogen interacts with cosmic rays, for example, it slowly eroded through various types of radiation and in some sense, just like your soap in your bathroom eventually becomes kind of flattened. Now, you’ve all seen this before, as you rub the soap around and as you basically use it over the next few weeks, it eventually becomes really really flat. The same mechanism applies to what happened here. It then entered the solar system, approached the closest point to the sun in 2017, and then made its way out of the solar system. Just a few months later, we were able to see it with the telescope and those deviations from the orbit were very likely caused by the evaporation of nitrogen ice from the surface. And as nitrogen evaporates, it doesn’t actually produce any kind of tails at all. We would not really be seeing this anywhere and on top of this, because this was a chunk of ice from another dwarf planet. The implication here is that it was probably also a lot more reflective, and thus the object was probably much smaller than we initially assumed, and by being so much smaller, the number of emissions coming from the object was able to deviate its orbit a lot more than initially predicted. So, by being a reflective chunk of ice and by also emitting a lot of nitrogen in the process, a lot of the observations of the orbital changes can be easily explained and are easily explained in this particular paper.
As a matter of fact, this explanation seems to provide the exact match to everything we’ve seen so far. Even the reflectivity of this object was very, very similar to the reflectivity we usually detect on objects like Pluto and Triton. So, in other words, Oumuamua was definitely a chunk of a dwarf planet or some sort of an object from another star system, but from the same region where we usually discover dwarf planets and the object itself probably came from a relatively young star system. This tells us that other star systems also have their own dwarf planets, which are probably made of the same stuff as Pluto, Triton, and a lot of dwarf planets in the solar system. But with recent estimates suggesting that approximately seven such objects should be passing through the solar system every single year, we now have a great opportunity to possibly discover another one of these objects and study it in a lot more detail before it disappears. Although the controversies and the non-scientific tales told about Oumuamua during the years, this is one of the most interesting discoveries of the last decade and is definitely one of those discoveries that a lot of scientists will be talking about in years to come.
0 Comments