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Spotted in 2017, the mysterious traveler in Oumuamua's space remains the first and only interstellar object we've seen through our solar system. Much has been speculated about what might be Oumuamua (which means "a visitor from afar" in Hawaiian), but a new study of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) provides answers.
For starters: it's pretty small. And the reason NASA knows it is that it honestly can not look good on 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 has turned out to be a challenge. SST was pointed at the interstellar object for two months after it passed closest to the Earth. The object was about 15 million kilometers. 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 (140 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 10 times more reflective than all the comets present 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.
Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Because "Oumuamua made an interstellar journey between star systems, its exterior could have accumulated to the point 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 is 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 measure of a weird comet, we measure it again until we understand what we see," Davide Farnocchia said. from the Center for Near-Earth Objects (CNEOS) at JPL. "But this one's gone forever, we'll probably know as much as we'll ever know."
Source: NASA
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