Wild Idea: What If Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is an Alien Light Sail?

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Wild Idea: What If Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is an Alien Light Sail?







The strange interstellar object that passed through the inner solar system last fall could be an extraterrestrial craft with a light sail, a new study suggests.



	

	In fact, an artificial origin would explain very well the many strange characteristics of that cosmic visitor, which is known as 'Oumuamua, coauthor of the study Avi Loeb said. 

		And Loeb said his colleagues should not dismiss this hypothesis just because he invokes intelligent aliens.

The[['Oumuamua: First interstellar visitor of the solar system explained in photos]

		"That's a prejudice we should not have," Loeb, who heads the astronomy department at Harvard University and runs the Institute of Theory and Computing (ITC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Space.com. "Science must be open."



		The rarity of 'Oumuamua





						


An artistic illustration of the interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua showing a degassing behavior similar to a comet. A new study suggests that the mysterious object could actually be an extraterrestrial craft with a thin, gauzy candle.

            						    Credit: NASA / ESA 


		'Oumuamua was discovered on October 19, 2017 by astronomers who used the Panoramic Survey Telescope and the Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii. (The name of the object means "messenger from afar" in Hawaiian.)

		'The trajectory of Oumuamua indicated that it is not from here, which makes it the first confirmed interstellar object observed in our Solar system. And 'Oumuamua is also unique in other ways, for example, in its form.

		The observations of 'Oumuamua indicate that the object is extremely long and narrow, measuring perhaps 1,300 feet long by 130 feet wide (400 by 40 meters). No other known cosmic object exhibits a needle-like shape.

		Nobody knows for sure how it looks' Oumuamua or how big it is. Astronomers were unable to capture a resolute image of the object, and visitor size estimates are based on its brightness (and on a practical knowledge of the reflectivity of comets and asteroids).  

		It has been difficult to determine what 'Oumuamua really is, too.

		Scientists initially considered the object a comet, but reclassified it as an asteroid after the observations revealed no tail or fuzzy coma. But earlier this year, a team of researchers. Once again he called 'Oumuamua like a comet After noticing that it shows non-gravitational acceleration. That movement can not be attributed to the pull of the sun, the planets or other objects of the solar system and, therefore (according to the authors of that previous study) it was probably due to the degasification of comets.

		That brings us to the new study, which Loeb did with the lead author, Shmuel Bialy, postdoctoral fellow at ITC. Bialy and Loeb do not believe that the Kite the explanation holds, because astronomers have not yet seen a tail or eat around 'Oumuamua. 

		In addition, degassing would have altered Oumuamua's rotation period, an effect that "would have been easy to identify," Loeb said. "But we have not seen such a change."

		There is another possible natural explanation, he added. If 'Oumuamua is just a fragment of a larger object, the observed movement could be from the "kick" that that fragment launched. But such a kick would be a one-time thing, while 'Oumuamua has shown repeated non-gravitational acceleration, Loeb said.

		Then, Bialy and Loeb came up with a new hypothesis: sunlight can be responsible. In the new study, the duo determined that solar radiation pressure could cause the non-gravitational movement observed if 'Oumuamua has a thickness of only 0.3 to 0.9 millimeters. 

		What kind of structure could be as thin as gauze? Bialy and Loeb suggested a candidate: a light candle, which is designed to take advantage of the momentum of photons as a driving force. Humanity has already demonstrated this technology in space; The IKAROS probe from Japan successfully traveled to the Venus neighborhood in 2010. (NanoSail-D2 from NASA and The Planetary Society LightSail Ship They toured the Earth in 2011 and 2015, respectively, but their missions consisted mainly of testing the deployment of the sail.)  

		Bialy and Loeb further calculated that a light-sailing Oumuamua could probably survive for a long time. interstellar travel. Given the concentration of gas and dust in the interstellar medium and the speeds at which the object would encounter these spots in deep space, the researchers determined that 'Oumuamua could be at least 16,000 light-years away from its domestic system (whatever sea ​​- 'The origin of Oumuamua remains a mystery). 

		"This is good news for SETI," Loeb said, referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 

		"This is not speculation," he added. "It is based on evidence, we have an anomaly in the data, the anomaly is that the orbit deviates from a Keplerian orbit, it deviates from what gravity would do by itself. [viable] There are no explanations for that, apart from the one we are proposing. "

The[[13 ways to hunt intelligent aliens]



		Space space or spy ship?

		To be clear, Bialy and Loeb do not claim in this study that 'Oumuamua is definitely an extraterrestrial ship. But they do think that this is a real possibility.

		The object could be a piece of extraterrestrial. space junk, a defunct sailing ship that has accidentally found its way to us. Or it can be an active reconnaissance ship sent here to check our solar system, the researchers wrote in the study.

		There are reasons to favor this last explanation, said Loeb. To begin with, the very discovery of 'Oumuamua was something of an anomaly. If the visitor is a member of a random population, stumbling over it the way we did, he suggests that each Star of the Milky Way ejects 1,000 billion objects in interstellar space during its lifetime, Loeb said. (These numbers are based on calculations made by Loeb and his colleagues a decade ago). Our own solar system does not throw as many objects similar to Oumuamua, he added.

		In addition, the movement of 'Oumuamua is roughly coincident with the average movement of the material in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy, a kinematic space known as the local resting standard. In fact, that is why the origin system of the object has been so difficult to pin down.

		"If I created an instrument whose identity I wanted to hide, I would put it in the local rest standard," Loeb said. 

		Astronomers have used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Allen Telescope Arsenal in Northern California to hear any possible signal from 'Oumuamua. To date, the object has He stay quiet. 





						


The IKAROS solar sail spacecraft from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is seen in deep space after the ship's deployment on June 14, 2010.

            						    Credit: JAXA 




		Getting an answer

		'Oumuamua is sailing towards the outer solar system so fast that we will never reach it with the traditional chemical rockets. But that does not mean we can never see the object up close.

		If we discover how to accelerate small robotic probes equipped with candles at tremendous speeds using lasers, we could launch a mission to 'Oumuamua', said Loeb. Projects like Starshot preview objective to launch this type of vessels in the coming decades. (Loeb chairs the advisory board of Breakthrough Starshot).

		Regardless of whether we ever managed to pursue Oumuamua, we should learn a lesson from their visit and be prepared to organize an observational bombardment the next time an object of this type passes through our neighborhood, Loeb said.  

		And such detection could come relatively soon. The powerful Big Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is scheduled to begin operating in the early 2020s in the Chilean Andes, may show another 'Oumuamua or two', said Loeb. 

		The example provided by 'Oumuamua should also inspire astronomers to analyze more closely other intriguing objects that are in view at the moment, said Douglas Vakoch, president of the non-profit organization METI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence Messaging) based in San Francisco.

		As an example, he noted KIC 8462852, also known as The star of Tabby or the star of Boyajian, after the researcher who noticed his strange and dramatic attenuation events a few years ago.

		"It is exciting to imagine that 'Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial solar sail that crosses our solar system, but we lack the only critical characteristic that SETI scientists demand.We can not replicate the observations, because' Oumuamua is already out of reach of Our best telescopes "Vakoch told Space.com by email.

		"Astronomers have emphasized the importance of collecting more data, since they have tried to understand the strange attenuation of KIC 8462852, without postulating the existence of Dison spheres"he added." But there is a critical difference between the Boyajian Star and 'Oumuamua. One of them is still visible, and the other has disappeared. "

		The new study will be published next week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read the document for free on the online prepress site arXiv.org. 



	Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life. "Out there, "will be published on November 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow it on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published in Space.com.

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