Oumuamua is the subject that has started the work of Abraham Loeb, it was discovered on October 19, 2017 by Robert Weryk using observations from the Pan STARRS telescope, its official name is 1I/ʻOumuamua.
It was concluded that it came from outside the solar system due to its orbital eccentricity and its speed, which indicates by its speed that it was never gravitationally bound to the solar system, it was only passing through, on its journey it had approached up to a few 24.1 million kilometers from us, that's just under half the distance from Earth to Mars, when it was at its closest.
The above is a schematic of Oumuamua's trajectory, the known trajectory, it was initially thought to be a comet, which would be quite logical, every once in a while a comet gets very close to the sun and undergoes a large acceleration from that close pass to the sun and ends up being thrown out of the solar system, that happens the same in the rest of the stars, so surely there are a lot of interstellar comets wandering through space.
In fact, on September 30, 2019, the second object that comes from another system was detected, it is called 2I/Borisov and that is clearly a comet, that is, an object formed mainly by ice, with dust and some rocks, 2I/ Borisov is half a kilometer in size and its closest approach to us was on December 8, 2019 at about 300 million kilometers.
Unlike 1I/ʻOumuamua. That it did not present cometary activity, if it had been formed by ice, being so close to the sun, a cloud of gas should have been seen around its nucleus, which is called a comet's coma, and a tail should also have been seen cometary, although it was small and faint, but nothing was seen, from which it was deduced that it was a dry object more similar to an asteroid and that is already somewhat rarer, because it is true that an asteroid that passes near the sun can also be accelerated and launched beyond the solar system, it turns out that there are many more comets than asteroids in the solar system, pure asteroids are made up of rocks and dust, we find them up to the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter, which is what is called the snow line or ice line, which is the area up to which the solar heat is capable of vaporizing the water ice.
Further on there is also talk of asteroids, but in them the amount of ice or rather of ice, since they have various structures and frozen gases is increasing and more important, such as the Jupiter Trojans, of which there may be several million and that it is in the same orbit as the gas giant or the intriguing centaurs that extend beyond jupiter between the orbits of the gas giants.
So Oumuamua turned out not to be a comet, it was classified as an asteroid; but it turns out that when it was moving away from the sun it began to do something very strange that puzzled scientists and it turns out that the object acquired a slight push moving away from the sun, a kind of rocket effect, which is common in comets when sunlight vaporizes the ice from which they are made but let us remember that Oumuamua is not a comet, it did not present cometary activity, that in addition the push was stronger than what could be explained by the mechanics that comets are normally known and this effect is where Abraham Loeb relies to affirm that Oumuamua could be an artificial remnant of a solar sail of extraterrestrial origin. What do you think?
Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights#crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)
! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!
