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In October 2017, astronomers around the world realized that they had seen something completely unbelievable: an object that was apparently a visitor to another solar system.
And now, some Harvard scientists say that the object that passed through our solar system at unprecedented speed may not be a coincidence.
A cosmic cigar
Before considering the claims of scientists, we must summarize what we know: this "something" measured 230 meters long, 35 meters wide and had roughly the shape of a cigar. For the color, the object was dark red. And he was turning around his longitudinal axis.
"Oumuamua" attracted the visitor. This is Hawaiian for "Spanish by far".
Initially, the object was classified as a comet, then as an asteroid. But that did not really matter either. Especially considering his way.
In particular, comets often have very eccentric paths that are far away in the backyard of the solar system before returning and that begin to "fall" back to the sun.
Sometimes the passage around the sun gives them an extra "kick" (the same principle as the snake), so insofar as they are ejected from the solar system for good.
A long distance visitor
But Oumuamua has turned out to be a lot more exotic than that. His path was hyperbolic, that is, it did not start or end in our solar system. It came from the outside. And after a narrow curve around the sun, he disappeared in the dark.
It is therefore considered an interstellar object.
And Oumuamua did not stop me from taking a closer look, if we say it. The gravity of the sun made it accelerate considerably: when Oumuamua rounded the sun, it reached a speed of almost 316,000 kilometers per hour.
Oumuamuas follows his passage in the solar system.
Oumuamuas path through the solar system.
And now he is coming out of the solar system, with a slight increase to the north compared to the ekliptika, or "equator" of the solar system.
But even if it still moves at about 30 km per second – like a bat, as Meat Loaf would say – it will take nearly 20,000 years for Oumuamua to disappear completely from our solar system.
In January 2019, it will nevertheless pass on the orbit of Saturn and, in 2022, leave behind him Neptune, the outermost planet of the solar system.
Shine is misleading?
And as said, there are now those who believe that Oumuamua can hide a secret under its rocky and rusty exterior. Nothing new under the sun, this kind of snack has bloomed in the spicy undergrowth of the canvas since we became aware of the existence of Oumuamua.
There were even those who wanted the stone to be nicknamed Rama because it looks like the exterior of the extraterrestrial extraterrestrial probe Arthur C Clarkes crossing the solar system in the same way as Oumuamua in the book Meeting with Rama .
However, two serious university professors from Harvard University in the United States, Professor Abraham Loeb and researcher Shmuel Bialy, seriously suggest that Oumuamua could be a space bomb emitted by an extraterrestrial civilization.
Understood: to spy on us. (An assumption that has been tested de facto by listening to it in case it would communicate some kind of radio communication with a third party.It has turned out to be completely silent.)
Suspected rapid acceleration
It is mostly Oumuamuas accelerations when it bypasses the sun that make scientists think that there is something serious about the process. They think that such an acceleration could be due to the fact that the machine, excuse me, is de facto hollow and a lot easier than it seems to be.
Assuming that Oumuamua is an empty and very light cylinder with respect to its volume, the speed could be achieved by the sunscreen effect, that is, the radiation pressure of particles in the sunlight gives it an impulse.
That it is possible to navigate using the wind of the sun, it is not a new, Johannes Kepler has already described the phenomenon in a letter to Galilee 1610.
IKAROS project.
Solseglet IKAROS.
Nowadays, there are theoretical projects aimed at exploiting the phenomenon of spatial needs, such as the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, and even practical experiments such as the IKAROS project.
Not everyone is convinced
But this Oumuamua would be an interstellar yacht sealed with solar energy, said Pekka Janhunen, research director at the Meteorological Institute, very hard to believe. Janhunen, who spoke for Yle, has developed an electric variant of the solar seal.
Janhunen considers Loeb and Bialy's "rather wild" hypothesis
Loeb and Bialy draw attention to the fact that Oumuamua is never surrounded by the usual gas veil, which usually occurs when asteroids pass near the sun and the intense heat causes gasification. of matter within the celestial body.
Janhunen thinks that it is likely that Oumuamua has spent so long in the interstellar space that it has been "hardened" so that it no longer provides gas.
A little earlier, it was suggested that Oumuamua is an ancient comet whose ice was burned during a previous pass under another sun.
"Extraordinary claims, etc."
Alan Jackson, a scientist at the University of Toronto at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, is also skeptical of the findings of his colleagues at Harvard. He believes that the studies of Loeb and Bialy are "really inadequate".
Jackson also reminds us of Carl Sagan's words: "Extraordinary demands require extraordinary evidence".
"And this study suffers from a significant lack of evidence, not to mention extraordinary evidence.
Jackson, who published a study in which he proposes that Oumuamua derives from a binary system, that is, from a two-solar system, also points out that all Spectral analyzes of the light emitted by Oumuamua indicate that it is an asteroid.
Loeb and Bialy are aware of this, but they suggest that someone might have covered Oumuamua with "interstellar dust" to mask its true light signature.
How do they say in Hollywood movies? "If you say so …"
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