[ad_1]
NASA has made the most of learning interstellar quirk. This is what he knows.
Spotted in 2017, the mysterious traveler in space "Oumuamua remains the first and only interstellar object that we have seen through our solar system. Much has been speculated about what might be "Oumuamua" (meaning "a visitor from afar" in Hawaiian), but a new study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) provides some answers.
For starters: it's rather small. And the reason NASA knows it is because it really can not look closely Oumuamua
NASA studied the traveler with the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST), an infrared telescope launched in 2003. The last of NASA's four observatories, the Great Observatory, it is mentioned in the same breath as more famous space telescopes like the Hubble . . And with a 33.5-inch diameter telescope lens, he is able to dive into the solar system.
However, "Oumuamua proved a challenge. SST was pointed at the interstellar object for two months after it passed closest to the Earth, whereas it was about 15 million kilometers away. All the while, 'Oumuamua was too weak for the SST to detect.
"Oumuamua was full of surprises from the first day, so we were eager to see what Spitzer could show," said David Trilling, lead author of the new study and professor of astronomy at Northern Arizona University, in A press release. "The fact that Oumuamua is too small to be detected by Spitzer is actually a very valuable result."
The non-detection of Spitzer allows scientists to understand the limits of Oumuamua. Its "spherical diameter" can reach up to 440 meters (440 meters), 140 meters (460 feet) or perhaps as little as 100 meters (320 feet). This range comes because scientists still do not know exactly what Oumuamua is made of.
SST reveals other news information about the interstellar visitor. He found that "Oumuamua is ten times more reflective than any existing comet in our solar system. When comets get closer to the stars, their icy interiors turn into gas. This gas then helps wipe off the outer layers of dust and debris accumulated along the way.
Because 'Oumuamua made an interstellar journey between star systems, its outer layer may have accumulated to such an extent that a huge amount of gas could have been released as the sun approached. As the rock flew in a vacuum, the released gases froze again and became an extremely bright surface.
Many mysteries about 'Oumuamua can remain unanswered. As a Harvard scientist recently suggested, unless it's an extraterrestrial probe, the object leaves our solar system and does not return. It's already too far to be detected by a space telescope.
"Usually, if we get a weird measure of a comet, we measure it again until we understand what we see," said Davide Farnocchia of the Center for Near-Earth Objects (CNEOS). ) of the JPL. "But this one is gone forever. We probably know as much as we will ever know.
Source: NASA
6
Source link
