Oumuamua, the mysterious asteroid from outside the Solar System, continues to surprise astronomers. Since the discovery of this object in space last October, an investigation led by the Queen's University of Belfast (United Kingdom) has commissioned its study.
Researchers from the School of Mathematics and Physics of the Queen's University of Belfast, Wes Fraser, Pedro Lacerda, Michele Banister and Alan Fitsimmons, together with an international team of scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Open University and the University of Belgrano, have discovered that this object is spinning chaotically and not periodically as the asteroids of its size do, according to the journal Nature Astronomy .
Although they cannot yet confirm why, Fraser has explained in a statement released by the University itself that the most likely cause of this unusual rotation is an impact with another planetesimal - a planet in formation - of the Oumuamua system of origin, before it was ejected into interstellar space. "Our modeling of the space body suggests that the chaotic rotation will last billions of years before internal tensions cause it to rotate normally."
Astronomers discovered the asteroid'Oumuamua' last October 19, thanks to the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope from the University of Hawaii (United States), while searching for near-Earth objects for NASA. Until now, scientists had revealed that'Oumuamua had a reddish colour tone similar to that of some planetoids outside the Solar System through observations made between 25 and 27 October from the William Herschell Telescope on La Palma, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and the Palomar Observatory in the United States.
After examining the light bouncing off the asteroid in detail, the team regrets that it is unable to obtain a higher resolution image to analyse what type of crater is in the asteroid and thus explain what type of collision propelled it. However, the new findings suggest that the colour of'Oumuamua is not reddish in its entirety but that'most parts of the surface are reflected in black, but one of its faces is reddish', can be read in the statement. "This advocates wide variations in composition, which is unusual for such a small body," Fraser said.
With regard to the coup, "it is difficult to know whether it was during the formation of the planet or after the process of the formation of the planet", Fraser himself pointed out to another of his colleagues during the presentation of the discovery on the BBC programme, Sky At Night. In this space, the scientist has taken the opportunity to explain that "the chaotic or wobbly movement of the asteroid causes internal tensions and pulls the object, which eliminates the energy of the rotation". However, "the damping process is going to take a long time," he added.
The results provide new clues about their formation and help to construct a more accurate profile of'Oumuamua, an asteroid whose native system of origin is still unknown.
Now, the team continues to explore space in search of asteroids or space objects similar to Oumuamua.