Harvard Researchers Suggest Interstellar Object Might Have Been From Alien Civilization (bostonglobe.com) 162
A strange interstellar object that invaded our solar system and passed close to Earth in the fall of 2017 could have been an artificial object, a piece of a spacecraft from an alien civilization, Harvard researchers are suggesting in a new paper [PDF]. From a report: "There is data on the orbit of this object for which there is no other explanation. So we wrote this paper suggesting this explanation," said Professor Avi Loeb, chairman of the Harvard astronomy department. "The approach I take to the subject is purely scientific and evidence-based. As far as I know, there is no other explanation. You can rule it out or in, based on additional data." He said the study had been accepted for publication in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Nov. 12.
The paper, written by Loeb and postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. The object 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. It was picked up by telescopes in October 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. Scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected.
The object raised eyebrows. It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. Further reading: Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is a Comet After All (June 2018), Scientists say mysterious 'Oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims.
The paper, written by Loeb and postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. The object 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. It was picked up by telescopes in October 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. Scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected.
The object raised eyebrows. It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. Further reading: Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is a Comet After All (June 2018), Scientists say mysterious 'Oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm pretty sure it was a cylinder sent by our humpback whale overlords.
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Hey, you got slashdot in my coast-to-coast am (Score:3)
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I'm not saying it's aliens, but ... TFA is saying it's aliens.
Until (Score:1)
Woah (Score:2)
Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust.
They must be SUPER advanced to cause their object to naturally form like that!!!
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If you wanted to travel to another solar system in a generation ship, would you build one from scratch or hollow out something suitable?
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You certainly wouldn't optimize the shape to feed the plants. You're either using hydroponics or a Biosphere II with artificial lighting inside. You'd have to. Whether you could pull off a Rendezvous With Rama-style dormancy is unclear, but frankly I don't see any advantage to it. If you're going the Biosphere II route, you need some decking, some artificial lighting, power and pumps for artificial circulation. There, you'd need gravity. If you're opting for hydroponics, why bother? The plants won't care.
I'
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Plants grow well without a gravity feed? Well, if you're growing algal feedstock for a "food synthesiser" (what is the Unobtanium budget for one of those? Or does it use Handwavium?), maybe not. Otherwise, for something resembling a balanced diet for the crew (assuming most of the colony-building animals are shipped as gametes, and a small number of live animals for use as wombs on arrival), you're going to need a
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Size estimates for 'Oumuamua range from 230m to 1000m - 240m being the commonest. Rotation periods are given as 6.96 and 8.1 hours (that's 417.6 and 486 minutes respectively, because my space-station designing toolbox works in RPM). For 230m, the rotation rates give 7.4*10^-07 and -5.4*10^-07 g. For 240m, the rotation rates give 7.7*10^-07 and 5.7*10^-07 g. For 1000m, the rotation rates give 32.1*10^-07 and 20.4*10^-07 g.
So, we can deduce using your argument that th
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Actually, it might.
It says that it's very unlikely any occupants are active and about. The only realistic way to have occupants with such low gravity for such prolonged periods of time is in some form of suspended animation. Frozen, it wouldn't matter what the gravity was like.
To answer whether this is viable, we need the centre of rotation versus the centre of mass (ie: is it a uniform mass) and we need to know the probable density (you'd be looking at something that is filled with something considerably d
Occam's razor (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be a downer but a far simpler explanation is that it just had an unusual manner of outgassing possibly due to the volatiles being below the surface and taking longer to heat.
Re:Occam's razor (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be a downer but a far simpler explanation is that it just had an unusual manner of outgassing possibly due to the volatiles being below the surface and taking longer to heat.
Let's see your numbers, bro. From the article:
"Oumuamua shows no signs of a any cometary activity, no cometary tail, nor gas emission/absorption lines were observed (Meech et al. 2017; Knight et al. 2017; Jewitt et al. 2017; Ye et al. 2017; Fitzsimmons et al. 2017). From a theoretical point of view, Rafikov (2018) has shown that if outgassing was responsible for the acceleration (as originally proposed by Micheli et al. 2018), then the associated outgassing torques would have driven a rapid evolution in ‘Oumuamua’s spin, incompatible with observations."
Re:Occam's razor (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't been keeping a count, but I do read the daily listings of new papers on Arxiv and I'm more or less up to date (one submission on my desktop at this time) there have been on the order of a dozen proposals from various sources trying various models of tholin/ dust crusting the surface of 'Oumuamua. While it's not exactly an exciting position to take, it is a consensus position.
Do your own homework. I have, to match the extent that I care about the topic.
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That's opposed to a magical solar sail that maintains orientation without attitude control ?
So your ruler is technology that we can understand?
Anyway, the OP didn't say anything about a solar sail. They just rightly pointed out the outgassing theory was already considered and abandoned.
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Yes, and that's exactly what the paper's authors looked at.
However, this is a draft paper, and hasn't made it through the peer-review process. I've had a couple of papers that were drastically transformed by the peer-review process. It would be interesting to track down this paper if it gets published. My bet is that the suggestion of an artificial explanation to the acceleration will be very much toned down, if not removed entirely.
It might have been. (Score:4, Insightful)
It might have been alien, but almost certainly wasn't.
Re:It might have been. (Score:5, Funny)
It might have been alien, but almost certainly wasn't.
You're not going to be landing a largish research grant with that attitude.
Re:It might have been. (Score:4, Funny)
Should've said it had a chance of changing our climate. That always works.
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Re:It might have been. (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it come from Earth?
No?
Then it's alien.
They decoded the message too. (Score:5, Funny)
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And please don't forget the Washington DC passengers STOP
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Really? I would have guessed either "Never gonna give you up" or "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
A light sail would be visible (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A light sail would be visible (Score:5, Interesting)
If it deployed a light sail upon leaving the solar system, the sail would be reflecting sunlight back at us now. A sail big enough to accelerate an object of that size would be visible.
Nobody has suggested that. The suggestion is that it could be a discarded piece of an old light sail.
I just happened to read the paper yesterday, and we're here dozens of comments in and nobody commenting has read it.
The jokes are amusing but assuming what the paper says and reacting to it is a less useful application of time that reading it (and maybe not even taking the time for reacts, if one must choose) or just cracking stupid jokes.
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You must be new here
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Did not once mention Natalie Portman.
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Problem with could is that it also be could not. It's an interesting object with some unique properties (not confirmed to be unusual because first of its type) and to put an alien spin on it is an attention seeking activity even among scientists. That attention seeking warrants jokes and moreso at the expense of the scientists that mention aliens seriously in any academic paper (unless they have definitive proof of course).
What we have is a first of its kind observation of a celestial occurrence that should
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My own view is that it is a giant Space Monkey turd. C'mon, elongated shape, weird trajectory, no identifying marks. The fellow just launched it here about 100 million years ago to buzz our solar system as a prank.
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I choose to believe in Space Monkey Turds and a Flying Space Pizza. Not because it is easy with evidence. But because it is hard to convince the non-believers that I am correct.
Re:A light sail would be visible (Score:5, Funny)
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(I'm about a third of the way through reading the paper, and I decided to check for substantive comment here. Depressing, isn't it?)
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I find your lack of faith troubling. No evidence means it *could* be Aliens. Or Bigfoot. Or the Lockness Monster. Or the Lizard People. Or the Flat Bread Earth (Space Pizza Earth for the un-educated American scrubs).
Didn't you see their credentials? Any person shouldn't be discouraged by "evidence" when dealing with matters of faith in credentials.
Re:A light sail would be visible (Score:5, Interesting)
It's on arxiv. It's almost certainly trash.
... and it's been accepted by ApJ letters, so it's almost certainly not.
It literally says:
"On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object in the Solar System, âOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) was discovered by the PAN-STARRS1 survey"
The paper is dated November 1st. In 13 days these people have looked at the FIRST EVER INTERSTELLAR OBJECT that we've literally only just been able to detect and come to the conclusion that it can only reasonably be part of an alien civilisation's UFO. With no context, alternative, or data beyond orbit and periodicity.
It's bunk.
Just in case you haven't realized it yet, 1 Nov. 2018 is 1 year and 13 days after 19 October, 2017.
The analysis of the extra orbital acceleration matches a 1/r^2 force. In regular comets, that's solar powered outgassing. Or, solar radiation pressure, if the thing is of the right form factor. No evidence of outgassing has been seen. I'm less clear how you get fit that form factor into the observations, but ok. The bulk of the paper, however, is an interesting analysis of how beat up a thin flat thing might get while traveling through interstellar space, something, say, their Breathrough Prize funders are pretty interested in knowing regardless (go google "Breakthrough Starshot"). The breathless "Alien!" headlines are mostly tacked on by places like Slashdot. The actual title of the paper is "COULD SOLAR RADIATION PRESSURE EXPLAIN ‘OUMUAMUA’S PECULIAR ACCELERATION?" (all caps coming from the journal's latex format, not me).
Read more carefully before spraying out "bunk" accusations. You'd make a really bad referee, good thing this paper got some decent ones instead.
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Right, but unless we're supposing nature makes light sail capable material naturally...
Humans haven't launched enough light sails for it be our trash, so its somebody else's trash in space most likely and the paper does suggest that.
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If it deployed a light sail upon leaving the solar system, the sail would be reflecting sunlight back at us now.
The advanced alien sail technology is constructed of dark matter and powered by dark energy.
A sail big enough to accelerate an object of that size would be visible.
You need to apply the definitions of real and virtual here:
If it's there, and you can see it . . . it's real.
If it's not there, but you can see it . . . it's virtual.
If it's not there, and you can't see it . . . it's gone.
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Extra-solar, possibly artificial object passes through solar system. Trump declares formation of Space Marines. Coincidence?
Get the tinfoil hats on, boys, the invasion is on the way!
Meh! He'd demand that the aliens build a wall around our solar system at their expense.
Elon (Score:2)
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You do realise Elon's Tesla Roadster passed beyond the orbit of Mars last week?
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No intelligent life found (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously it was alien and in search of intelligence and it just passed us by.
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Maybe it is coming back with reinforcements.
Giant Space Turd (Score:3)
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Well, after they ate all those barrels of chalky candy hearts - that was probably the most likely outcome.
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Re:It's a rock (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the closer you get to the galactic center the more volatile to life the environment gets. As such, life has more time to grow and advance the further one is from the galactic core
That's quite an assumption. A more violent environment (assuming you meant violent and not volatile) might also be a driving force behind faster evolution.
For example, on earth the great extinctions actually sped up the evolution. Without them (or better: in between them) evolution went relative slow.
Of course, you don't want a bunch of supernova's and gamma rays ionizing any atom on the planet all the time, but a more `challenging` environment might as well speed up evolution instead of slowing it down. We just don't know yet until we increase our current sample size of 1.
(posting as anon as i modded a bit in the topic already)
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Earth didn't develop complex life until things calmed down here. From our current working sample set (size: 1) it's reasonable to assume that you need a less chaotic environment to develop life. You might need a moon to stir things up, though.
It's just another kind of goldilocks zone.
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Earth didn't develop complex life until things calmed down here. From our current working sample set (size: 1) it's reasonable to assume that you need a less chaotic environment to develop life. You might need a moon to stir things up, though.
It's just another kind of goldilocks zone.
The moon actually keeps things calm down here on Earth. Its a self-balancing mechanism that prevents the Earth's movements from doing anything too radical.
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There is an awful lot of extrapolation done from the sample of one evolutionary system that we have, and happen to be living in the middle of. And a lot of awful extrapolation.
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"The moon... prevents the Earth's movements from doing anything too radical." Then how do you explain lunacy?
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So did social development. There is a lot of evidence that the sudden flooding of the Black Sea caused a major impulse in civilisation.
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Yeah, it
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That is the gist of a proposition published by Ryan and Pitman in 1997. They proposed it on the basis of finding a couple of deeply-incised channels in the sediment and bedrock (their interpretation, not accepted by everyone) near the mouth of the Bosphorous.
But, with more work (seismic survey boats don't come this way very often, and cruising slowly across an extremely busy shipping lane will get you arrested, your vessel impounded, and probably the vessel master appe
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We know it's not Rama (Score:2)
The object is neither long enough or wide enough to hold a multitude of species. Nor was its approach to the Sun close enough to allow the Frozen Sea to melt. Finally, when it dove out of the orbital plane, it never accelerated sharply.
Thus, we can safely say it is not a Raman design. Besides, we didn't have any spacecraft capable of intercepting it and having people explore it.
If aliens (Score:1)
I don't know if I will believe in the aliens idea, but if it is it may be:
1. A spaceship with hairdressers and Telephone cleaners (Hitchhiker guide to the Galaxy)
2. Aliens looking for intelligent life somewhere and they just by change passed near us.
3. Aleins detected signals around this solar system and were exploring Venus or Jupiter
4. Aliens have found us, and have alreadyy sent down a landing capsule to Earth loaded with explorerer
What They're Not Saying (Score:1)
Among them are drug dealers and gang members.
Many are pregnant and will deposit their fertilized eggs on American soil.
The only solution is to build a wall around the entire Earth.
We're living the plot for "Rendezvous with Rama" (Score:2)
Look it up if you haven't already. Great book.
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I think this Oumuamua case is more similar to a short story in the collection of "Pirx the Pilot" by Stanislaw Lem. In that an alien mega ship wreck flies right through the solar system but due to general incompetence and lack of attention it becomes too late to give chase while the object moves out at 3rd cosmic speed.
Re: We're living the plot for "Rendezvous with Ram (Score:1)
Rama was a cylinder not a sphere. RTF book!
Page 12 50km x 20km.
Wat? (Score:2)
Meanwhile the "Ancient Aliens" crowd just orgasmed with this BS.
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I'm not certain how useful a solar sail would be on a device that came from another solar system.
To be a solar system implies having a star. A solar sail in another solar system with a star would be just as useful as a solar sail within our own solar system.
The fact such a thing would eventually end up leaving the solar system it was originally in shouldn't be assumed to be intentional so much as a fact of nature.
All of the probes we have ever sent out so far will have that same fate, and the voyagers may have already done so depending where you put the edge of the solar system to be. In a few millio
Where was it from? (Score:3)
We know its current course and speed, so if you extrapolate into the distant past, does it cross the orbit of any nearby star?
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To-MAY-to / To-MAH-to (Score:2)
Kah-Meht
xkcd.com (Score:2)
It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected.
Obligatory... [xkcd.com]
Paging Elon Musk! (Score:3, Interesting)
How far is SpaceX away from being able to cobble up a flyby probe to at least get a close look at this object?
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How far is SpaceX away from being able to cobble up a flyby probe to at least get a close look at this object?
Probably not possible. Oumaumua is traveling at 26 km/s at infinity. So far, the fastest space craft we've made is the Parker Probe which was only 21 km/s while diving towards the sun. So, it's traveling faster than anything else we've managed (Voyagers are in the upper teens for km/s) to send into space. I have my doubts on the current Falcon Heavy being able to get any faster. The BFR might, but it's years out, but it's such a faint object that Oumuamua might be too far out to keep track of by that time i
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But now consider SpaceX’s rate of technological progress. I could live to see that object captured and retrieved to star in a future, Earth-orbiting addition to the Smithsonian.
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Well there is this ION drive that NASA has that should be fast enough.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/g... [nasa.gov]
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A few dozen astronomic units ...
Nothing stops it (Score:5, Insightful)
From being just a rock and a spaceship.
If you wanted to fly to the stars, you'd need a ship with a very thick hull to handle galactic background radiation. If you wanted to go slow, you'd also make it a generation ship, which means you need something very large for the population and life support.
That's simply not very practical to build. But why build? Find an asteroid on an extreme elliptical orbit, hollow it out, and use the interior for your ship. Walls already made for you, and you've extracted ore you can use to make floors, engines, etc.
It probably was just a fragment from two planets colliding, but the assumption that it couldn't have been that plus a spaceship is flawed.
The lack of signal isn't an issue. Why would a generation ship transmit signals? Who would it transmit to? Space is very big, after all, and radio is very slow. With walls thick enough to shield against galactic winds, nothing on the inside would have reached Earth.
Only way we could have known for sure would be to have put a lander on it. But there's a distinct lack of space probes capable of such redirected missions. Thank you, American tax payer. Arthur C. Clarke would have been fuming. The good news is that the builders of Rama do everything in threes.
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Only about a dozen metres of water-ice. Down to around 5m for a 50-50 ice-rock dust mix. Not trivial, but not horrendous.
The odds of meeting something large enough to fragment ... well, 'Oumuamua got here after an uncertain (but probably very long) travel, so ... low enough. Send two, travelling outside their mutual ballistic debris cones.
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So?
You're indulging in a decades-long free-space rebuilding of an asteroid. You've got in-space engineering down pat long before you do that.
And you'd not move most of the material more then a few km while building your spacecraft. You'll also be building motors at the same time and place. And turning the volatiles of the "donor" asteroid into pumpable reaction mass. For the engines. Which will need testing.
To "remove" mass implies giving it enough energy to move it out of
Please... take our leader. (Score:3, Funny)
Engaging in pure speculation (Score:1)
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"Next time you're visited
By little green aliens,
They're not there unless
They come back twice a week."
-- Dr. Jane, "A Scientist Looks At Things That Don't Exist".
ugh. Such poor reporting... (Score:3)
/. fell for it too. I think Ars has a good write up of the click-bait news cycle on this one. The paper is pages long and goes into great detail. Then on the last line "could be aliens too" and that's all people read.
Bloggers vs Science Writers.
"Predictably, online media go nuts over ‘Oumuamua and Harvard scientists"
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Capital offence : RTFA (Score:2, Informative)
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Space Cash (Score:1)
RAMA or Ark ship B (Score:2)
It must be either RAMA or the Ark Ship 'B'...
Gravity assist? (Score:2)
To start with the obvious, IANAA(stronomer).
However, looking at the object's trajectory [hawaii.edu] I find it interesting that it passes so close to the sun - almost as if it was targeted this way.
Of course, if it had passed too far from the sun, we wouldn't have seen it at all. Still, I'd expect interstellar objects within say the orbit of Jupiter to be noticed. However, Oumuamua's closest approach to the sun (at 38,100,000 km) hit a circle less than 1/400 of the area of Jupiter's orbit. It does seem a bit weird to me
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If you RTFA'd on 'Oumuamua as it was happening (which I do to a degree by at least reading the abstracts as they go past on the Arxiv mailing list, one email a day, and fully reading interesting papers), you'd have seen that the normal unit of measure for "interstellar objects passing near the Sun" is actually to count "bodies within a sphere containing Neptune". Quite what the logic behind that is, I'm not sure, but it's a volume of about 3.80E+29cu.km. If they looked at bo
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perihelion passage date
Every time... (Score:2)
Re: Thought experiment, B) Light energy is kinetic (Score:1)
Fucking stop. Now.
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"Build a Dyson Wall around them and make the Andromedians pay for it! It's a caravan full of bad bleepniks, believe me! They'll stick their slimy blue tentacles up your family's down-there-parts while you sleep and do harm not covered by lame Obamacare. Bigly sad! #MakeGalaxyGreatAgain"
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"the object entered our solar system with a greater velocity than could be explained by the gravitational pull of our sun" Huh? What does the Sun's gravitational pull have to do with it? The object was not sitting out at some point stationary relative to the Sun, and then started falling. It was already moving when it began to feel the Sun's pull. So *naturally* it's speed was greater than the speed that an object would acquire just by falling towards the Sun.
"the object accelerated on it's way out of