‘Oumuamua is an alien ship? The mystery may have been solved

It was once considered a cosmic iceberg, a ball of dust and a “cousin” of Pluto. But, without a doubt, the most inspiring explanation is that it is an alien spacecraft with a mission to monitor the Earth. A study published on Wednesday (22) in the journal naturehowever, he disputes this hypothesis and may have unraveled the mystery surrounding the eccentric interstellar body known as ‘Oumuamua.

According to the new approach, the object’s bizarre movements have nothing to do with technologies that may have been developed by intelligent extraterrestrial beings.

This strange interstellar visitor was discovered in 2017, making it the first object ever detected in our solar system that originated outside it. Since then it has raised many suspicions among scholars, becoming a scientific mystery mainly due to the oscillation in the speed with which it moved away from the gravitational pull of the Sun.

Such behavior is common in comets, when the ice inside them begins to warm up as they approach our star, but ‘Oumuamua is not a comet.

The cigar-shaped object, 400 meters long and about 40 meters wide, was once thought to be such, but since it did not form a tail or emit a cloud of dust and gas as it approached the Sun, such a possibility had been ruled out outside .

Have scientists ever considered that ‘Oumuamua might just be a “different” asteroid? It could even have passed for an asteroid, since these space rocks move by themselves under the influence of gravity. But the incredible speed changes the researchers observed when it was close to the Sun ruled that out.

For the authors of the recently published paper, the explanation lies in hydrogen molecules trapped within the ice below the object’s surface that may have been released as the Sun heated it, affecting the speed of its flight through the star.

In this scenario, ‘Oumuamua was born in a distant planetary system as an ordinary comet-like object. At some point, hundreds of millions of years ago, it broke free from its native system and began a long journey through interstellar space, where cosmic rays hit the water trapped in its body and released hydrogen atoms, which recombined as hydrogen molecules.

These hydrogen molecules became trapped within pockets of ice on ‘Oumuamua. In the very cold temperatures of interstellar space, this ice has a disorganized glassy structure.

As the object traveled through our solar system’s relative heat, its ice began to develop a slightly more organized structure, as if it was preparing to crystallize, similar to ice on Earth.

In this process, enough hydrogen escaped to push the object slightly against the Sun’s gravity.

“I think this explanation makes a lot of sense,” Marco Micheli, an astronomer at the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center in Italy, said in a statement to the website. living science. “It is probably the most consistent model so far that fully explains what we observed at ‘Oumuamua without the need for any exotic explanations.”

Micheli was not involved in the new study, but wrote an editorial on the work for the Nature.

According to the authors of the paper, the hydrogen effect probably occurs in normal comets that originate in the Solar System, but probably does not affect the speed or trajectory of objects, unless they are very small – such as ‘Oumuamua.

“If we can find smaller comets from the Oort cloud – at the edge of the Solar System – as they are arriving, we could potentially test whether we see hydrogen outgassing,” said lead author of the new study Jennifer Bergner, a chemist at the University of California, California, Berkeley, USA.

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Source: Olhar Digital