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The mystery about the interstellar object Oumuamua is far from over.
At the end of last year, a kind of cylindrical visitor of space entered the solar system, attracting all kinds of intrigues from astronomers.
Was it an asteroid? A comet?
Or maybe the first evidence of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization?
Astronomers listened to Oumuamua to find out if he was emitting a radio signal. But none has been detected.
Chances are that Oumuamua is not a dead spaceship that winds through the solar system, but that does not mean that it is not something artificial.
In an article published Thursday (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf), Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysics Center, presented the hypothesis that Oumuamua might well to be extraterrestrial: a light sail, probe powered by solar radiation, sent by another solar system. How could this be possible?
Although a previous study showed that the acceleration of Oumuamua in the solar system was consistent with the behavior of a comet, this hypothesis poses a problem: there is no observation of gas emitted by the object; in other words, no tail, as you would see with all the other comets. So, if it's not a comet, what could rather cause its behavior?
According to the authors of the paper, the behavior of Oumuamua could explain the solar radiation, which would imply that the interstellar object should be very thin compared to its surface. According to Bialy and Loeb, Oumuamua 's unique tilting motion in space would make these properties likely.
The problem is that Oumuamua is too small and now too far away for any real observation. Astronomers can only speculate on the basis of their knowledge of the observed behavior of other known objects and the behavior of Oumuamua.
One thing of this article is clear: Automatically assuming that Oumuamua is a comet, an asteroid or other rocky object is a rash, and one must be open minded when considering the possibilities for at its origin.
Contact astronomy writer Joe Malan at [email protected].
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