Long article, but here are the key paragraphs:
Oumuamua was actually discovered by a Canadian astronomer, Robert Weryk, using the Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. “Oumuamua” is Hawaiian for “first distant messenger” – in a word, “scout.” It was discovered on October 19, 2017, suspiciously close to Earth (relatively speaking, of course: Oumuamua was 33 million kilometers away from us when it was sighted – 85 times farther than the moon is from Earth).
Whereas all the planets, asteroids and meteors that originate within the solar system more or less circle what is called the Ecliptic plane, that of our sun, since they were formed from the same disc of gas and dust that rotated around itself, Oumuamua entered the solar system north of the plane, in an extreme hyperbolic orbit and at a speed of 26.3 kilometers per second faster relative to the motion of the sun.
A reconstruction of its trajectory shows that Oumuamua traversed the ecliptic plane on September 6, 2017, when the sun’s gravity accelerated the object to a velocity of 87.8 kilometers per second. On September 9, the object passed closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury. And on October 14, five days before it was discovered in Hawaii, the object passed 24.18 million kilometers away from Earth, or 62 times the distance from here to the moon.
“It was subjected to observation, but not enough,” Loeb told me with disappointment, when I met with him in Tel Aviv at the end of December. “It was only under consecutive observation for six days, from October 25 to 31 – namely, a week after its discovery. At first they said, Okay, it’s a comet – but no comet tail was visible. Comets are made of ice, which evaporates as the comet approaches the sun. But we didn’t see a trail of gas or dust in Oumuamua. So the thinking was that it must be an asteroid – simply a chunk of stone. But the object rotated on its axis for eight hours, and during that time its brightness changed by a factor of 10, whereas the brightness of all the asteroids that we’re familiar with changes, at most, by a factor of three. If we assume that the light reflection is constant, that means its length is at least 10 times greater than its thickness.
“There are two possibilities in regard to this extreme geometry,” Loeb continues. “One is that it’s in the shape of a cigar, the other than it has the shape of a pancake. The truth is that the same observers who examined Oumuamua’s light variation reached the conclusion that if it receives a lot of gravitational pushes during the voyage – which is reasonable, because it spent a lot of time in interstellar space – its shape is pancake-flat. Subsequently additional qualities were discovered, such as its origin.”
I wrote above that Oumuamua originated at Vega, but that’s not completely accurate: The universe is a vast place, and even at Oumuamua’s velocity – a velocity that no human spaceship has achieved – a voyage from Vega to the solar system would take 600,000 years. But in the meantime, Vega is orbiting the center of the Milky Way, like the sun and all the other stars, and it wasn’t in that region of the heavens 600,000 years ago.
“If you average the velocities of all the stars in the region,” Loeb explains, “you get a system that’s called the ‘local standard of rest.’ Oumuamua was at rest relative to that system. It didn’t come to us. It waited in place, like a buoy on the surface of the ocean, until the ‘ship’ of the solar system ran into it. To make things clear, only one of 500 stars in the system is as much at rest as Oumuamua. The probability of that is very low. After all, if it were a stone that was simply hurled from a different solar system, we would expect it to have the velocity of its star system, not the average velocity of all the thousands of stars in the vicinity.”
However, the biggest surprise came last June, when new data from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the mysterious object had accelerated during its visit to the inner solar system in 2017 – an acceleration that is not explained by the sun’s force of gravity.
Acceleration of that sort can be explained by the rocket effect of comets: The comet approaches the sun, the sun warms the ice of the comet and the ice escapes into space in the form of gas, an emission that makes the comet accelerate like a rocket. But the observations did not reveal a comet tail behind Oumuamua. Moreover, gas emission would have brought about a rapid change in the rate of the object’s spin, a change which was also not observed in practice, and it also might have torn the object apart.
If it wasn’t comet outgassing, what force caused Oumuamua to accelerate? It is precisely here where Loeb enters the picture. According to his calculations, Oumuamua’s acceleration was caused by a push.
“The only hypothesis I could think of,” he relates, “is a push from solar radiation pressure. For that to work, the object would have to be very thin, less than a millimeter thick, in other words a type of pancake. In addition, the Spitzer Space Telescope found no evidence of heat emission from the object, and that means that it is at least 10 times more reflective than a typical comet or asteroid. What we have, then, is a thin, flat, shiny object. So I arrived at the idea of a solar sail: A solar sail is a spaceship that uses the sun for propulsion. Instead of using fuel, it is propelled ahead by reflecting light. In fact, it’s a technology that our civilization is developing at this very time.”
“We have no way of knowing whether it’s active technology, or a spaceship that is no longer operative and is continuing to float in space. But if Oumuamua was created together with a whole population of similar objects that were launched randomly, the fact that we discovered it means that its creators launched a quadrillion probes like it to every star in the Milky Way. Of course, the randomness is significantly reduced if we assume that Oumuamua was a reconnaissance mission that was deliberately sent to the inner solar system – namely, to the habitable region where life would be feasible. But we need to remember that humanity didn’t broadcast anything tens of thousands of years ago, when the object was still in interstellar space. They didn’t know there was intelligent life here. Which is why I think it’s just a fishing expedition.”
Link: Oumuamua
The jig is up!
He is colluding with aliens for interstellar domination. If there are aliens aboard I bet they stay at one of Trump’s hotels.
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
If it is a probe, and if the probe was sent out so long ago, and if faster than light travel is possible, then one would think that the race that sent it would have figured out a way to get here faster by now, and beaten its own probe here.
So, if it is a probe, and given the fact that we saw it without prior contact, then perhaps one of two conditions exists: either the race extinguished itself or its technology base (or was extinguished by external forces), or faster than light travel is not possible.
A rotating solar sail implies the thing was dead.
--
That thing is how we should be probing...nice and quiet like. We should not be targeting other systems with powerful communication beams.
(no message)
(no message)
What could go wrong?
and free health care.
They are getting close to completing their mission...