Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- ‘Oumuamua is an oddly shaped, puzzling celestial object because it doesn’t act like anything naturally occurring.
- The issue? The unexpected way it accelerated near the Sun. Is this our first sign of extraterrestrials?
- It’s pronounced: oh MOO-uh MOO-uh.
That odd-shaped visitor from beyond our solar system, ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”), has been fascinating from the moment it arrived: It’s a spaceship, it’s a rock, it’s a comet, it’s not a comet.
But is it a spaceship? That’s where its behavior has some scientists at Harvard leaning; they suggest it may be a device of some kind powered by a lightsail, or a piece of one.What’s got experts so puzzled about ‘Oumuamua is, as an about-to-be-published paper says: “‘Oumuamua showed deviations from a Keplerian orbit at a high statistical significance.” In English: It sped up as it approached the Sun. Comets can do this, but ‘Oumuamua has been disqualified as an active comet, as it has no tail. Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, the authors of the paper, propose that the increase in speed could be due to “solar radiation pressure.” The bottom line, they say, is that the discrepancy “is readily solved if ‘Oumuamua does not follow a random trajectory but is rather a targeted probe.” The paper discusses the math involved and finds that its “general results apply to any light probes designed for interstellar travel.”
What we saw is what we get
(NASA/Alan Fitzsimmons)
That dot in the center is an actual image of ‘Oumuamua.
‘Oumuamua’s gone from our view at this point, so any analysis of it or its movements is limited to the data collected during its period of observability. It was first spotted from the PAN-STARRS telescope on Maui (hence its Hawaiian name) on October 19, 2017, and by January 2018 it was gone. Any conclusions we draw have no way of being tested now.
At the time, ‘Oumuamua was scanned for radio waves — a basic means of communicating which we assume/hope is the universe’s lingua franca — and no radio waves were found, leading observers away from suspicions that its origin could be an alien civilization.
At first, ‘Oumuamua was assumed to be an asteroid, but its subtle gain in speed as it drew near the Sun…
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