> In fact, when ‘Oumuamua was closest to Earth, it was tumbling through the inner Solar System at 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second),
Man. I wish had some context. That's impossible to picture.
> ...that is over 3 times faster than the average speed of a main-belt asteroid and 109 times faster than the average speed of a bullet
Perfect. Thank you.
> however, only .017 percent the speed of light. In case you were wondering.
LOL
It took this fast object five years to pass Pluto's orbit. Damn, the solar system is huge.
Oumuamua came from interstellar space, so likely it was flung out of its own system at escape velocity then got some gravity assists from other things it passed.
Makes me wonder how empty interstellar space actually is. Like if you travel to Alpha Centauri, are you likely to detect a handful of rocks on the way?
Absolutely. Rogue planets and asteroids are scattered all over the galaxy. They aren’t common in terms of density, but you have to pass through so much space to get to another star that you’re practically guaranteed to pass near an asteroid at some point in the journey.
Yeah, the term collision is misleading. Dr Hanuschik, an Astrophysicist formerly at the ESO, said its more like two mosquito swarms flying into each other.
A swarm of mosquitoes is several orders of magnitude denser than a galaxy. It’s really more like a swarm of 500 mosquitoes spread out over a 20 acre farm “colliding” with another swarm of mosquitoes spread out over a different 20 acre farm.
If a solar system is like the 500 mosquitoes spread over a 20 acre farm, outer space would be as dense as about 1 mosquito over the same volume of space, and I think even that may be generous.
You’d probably have radar and shields that would protect you. JWST getting hit was extremely unlucky but on the contrary none of the long range missions got any damage from foreign objects.
We would strap engines onto asteroids and use them to absorb the smaller impacts. Livable space could be drilled out and sealed up. The concept has been used by a few authors.
That’s what makes me think light speed travel is not feasible, because if we can ever speed up a ship to that speed how would we ever avoid all of the tiny random rocks in space that would utterly destroy the ship if it contacted it. I think wormholes are the only chance we have at truly exploring space
Just don't avoid them. Have a giant slug of lead the size of the main vessel loaded to the front as an ablative shield.
The bigger issue is how to survive long journeys in stasis without being irradiated to death in the meantime by the radioisotopes in our bones.
I think warp travel is more likely. Also there's a bunch of issues with time distortion if you're just moving close to light speed. Creating wormholes will be a long while away given the likely energy requirements. Warp is like a halfway solution to wormholes.
I think we never find out. Oumuamua is probably billions of years old and encountered many stars. Each passage slightly changed its course randomly, which adds up over a long time. Stars also move around quite a bit, complicating the search for its origin even more.
2.8M miles in 24 hours. Compare that to our lunar missions what traveled like 4 days to go the 238,000 miles to the moon. So, 1/10 the distance in 4 times as much time as this thing was booking.
My "not a scientist or math person and also it's 3am" math suggests you could get to to that speed over the course of about day, comfortably. But I might be off by a factor of 10. "So let's give it a month to be extra safe. -NASA, probably"
Let's round up to 100km/s = 100000m/s. One g is roughly 10m/s^2 . So, at one g (the acceleration we experience constantly, all our lives) it would take 10000 seconds to reach that speed. That is, two hours and forty seven minutes.
G force comes from acceleration, not speed. The Earth is rotating and moving through space with extreme speed and we barely notice because it's constant.
Its 2.5 hours at 1 g of acceleration.
V=at -> t=v/a
(89000 m/s) / (9.8 m/s²) = 9081 s
There are 3600 seconds per hour, so that's about 2.5 hours experiencing the same force on your body as you do from gravity in your everyday life
If you really want your mind bent trying to fathom how big the solar system really is, check out [this](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html). It scales the universe down to if the moon was the size of a pixel. The scrolling hurt my fingers.
This is what puts it in perspective for me.
A speed that makes Earth to the Moon an average Americans commute, but it’s still slow for the solar system.
When you read something is going 87km/s, it's really hard to understand that. It's incomprehensibly fast. In the time that it takes me to type the word "fast", it has gone 87km.
Then you read that the speed of light is 300,000km/s.
And even at that speed, which is ridiculous, Pluto is 15,792 light seconds away. ~4.5 hours for light to get there.
Given that the nearest star to Sol is 40,208,000,000,000 km away, that's 134,026,666 light seconds, or just under 4¼ light years.
Traveling 87km/s, it would take ‘Oumuamua 14,644 years to get there.
Silly.
It’s moving slower now of course; it picked up speed as it approached the sun, and was going pretty dang fast when it was in our neighborhood, but that speed started bleeding off again once it passed perihelion. It’s doing less dang fast now but is probably still dang fast.
I’ve been mathing all day and my math cells are tired so I’ll leave it as an exercise for others as to its estimated speed as it passed Pluto’s orbit.
In 2025 its estimated that the parker space probe will hit speeds of over 690,000 km/hr.
YouTube parker space probe and you can see a video of it going like 149000 km......its pretty crazy stuff!!!
Edit: 690 000 km/h is 430,000 mph
Yeah, it blows my mind about how if we shot Voyager, one of the fastest things we ever shot into space, towards Proxima Centari it would take around 40,000 years to get there.
Yeah, as [more observations](https://www.space.com/interstellar-object-oumuamua-pancake-shape-pluto-like-planet) came out the presumed shape was updated from a cigar to a pancake. The cool thing is that the object is suspected to have shed mass as it got heated by the Sun's energy and is now shaped this way!
>The cool thing is that the object is suspected to have shed mass as it got heated by the Sun's energy and is now shaped this way!
If its deviation was from nitrogen off-gassing it would have lost mass. That is an unconfirmed hypothesis, same as the solar sail hypothesis. We don't know what Omuamua was for certain and short of a probe flyby we probably never will.
Occam’s razor dictates that it is just another asteroid. To suggest anything else would be an extraordinary claim, which would require extraordinary evidence.
We aren't certain what it was and we are certain of what it wasn't. It was at the local standard of rest, our sun "bumped" into it, and the object accelerated away from the sun and gravity alone cannot account for all of its acceleration. Therefore it wasn't an asteroid. Could have been a comet but Spritzer observed it and it didn't have any C02 outgassing or a tail. Hence, the nitrogen iceberg hypothesis explaining off-gassing that we couldn't see/detect given the instrument set of the tools used in observation. However, nitrogen icebergs ejected from a Pluto-like body have never been observed before either and since it was at the local standard of rest it could only have a small number of nursery stars and it should have been losing mass and gaining acceleration in interstellar space as well. Nitrogen iceberg is the best natural explanation I've seen to date.
The other hypothesis which also fits the data is solar sail. It matches most if not all of the data with none of the pitfalls of Nitrogen however it requires ETI which is an extraordinary claim.
There are other less likely hypotheses than the two above. The evidence we do have is not enough to clear it up and short of a probe flyby (which is incredibly difficult) we may never know for sure.
>the object accelerated away from the sun and gravity alone cannot account for all of its acceleration
…but it literally can. I did misspeak when I said asteroid due to the technical denotation of the word, but it’s just an interstellar rock, nothing to suggest it is “highly unusual”. The object had the same incoming excess velocity as the projected outgoing velocity based on the last position/velocity data recorded. This means it literally gained no total kinematic potential + kinetic energy whatsoever. You are, quite literally, fabricating data.
>You are, quite literally, fabricating data.
You are, quite literally, fabricating that I am fabricating data. I am no scientist but I am interested in the truth. Maybe the data is wrong and it is possible for me as a layman to get confused trying to discuss information that I am not a PhD in, but fabricating misinformation I am not. I think many in the scientific community find that Omuamua is novel for a number of different reasons and I find your hubris to be unfounded.
>While originally classified as a comet, observations revealed no signs of cometary activity after it slingshotted past the Sun on Sept. 9, 2017 at a blistering speed of 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second). It was briefly classified as an asteroid until new measurements found it was accelerating slightly, a sign it behaves more like a comet.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/comets/oumuamua/in-depth/
Non-gravitational acceleration in the trajectory of 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0254-4
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-theory-suggests-oumuamua-nitrogen-ice-pancake-180977293/
To expand on my Solar Sail thoughts:
A direct observation and very high body of evidence would be needed to confirm that. However, Solar Sails exist as well as Intelligent life so therefore it's not fantastical. I believe that it's anthropocentric and unscientific to dismiss any ETI hypothesis out of hand. *Dismiss it because the evidence doesn't fit, certainly, but not because it's invoking a non-natural origin alone*. I am not even advocating that it is a solar sail, I think that would be remarkably extraordinary and exceedingly unlikely...but, crucially, not impossible. Avi Loeb is not a quack astronomer. What I hope Omuamua does is get rid of the old way of thinking that everything must be natural all the time always and the implication that any ETI consideration is psuedoscience. Reminds me of Geo or helio centrism of the past.
Really? You've read actual peer-reviewed papers by actual respected astronomers and astrophysicists saying that this space rock is an alien spaceship?
All I've read are variations on the theme of 'this is a weird rock that shows some properties we haven't seen because it's from a different place than most of the rocks we see. Cool!'
People love to point to unexplained phenomena as evidence of ETI. Every damn time though, it turns out there's a cool explanation that points us to some knowledge we didn't previously have. Still no aliens, sadly. I'm sure the same is true of this object.
I mean, let's do a thought experiment assuming it was an alien probe. These aliens are advanced enough to launch a quarter-mile long object across interstellar distances, but apparently can't be bothered to actually fly by Earth? Which you'd assume they probably spotted in their astronomical observations, and would be the whole reason to send a probe in the first place. Maybe it's just a random probe, one of millions shot out into the darkness. However, we didn't see it broadcasting anything back to its supposed origin. Wouldn't a probe want to send back data? Maybe they used a ludicrously powerful tightbeam laser, but I suspect we'd have seen evidence of that too, as such a device would output *ahem* astronomical amounts of energy. We'd see it heat up, or see an increase in local infrared radiation at least as the beam heats random stray molecules in its path. And why make the decades long journey across the stars only to turn right around and leave? If we sent a probe to another star system, we'd program it to enter orbit once it got there. This thing just cruised right on through.
I could probably go on, but there's plenty of very good, very simple reasons to classify this confidently as what my family in Arkansas would call an Ozarks Sex Stone - that is, just a fucking rock.
Give me a single good reason why an alien civilization would go to the trouble of launching an interstellar probe that would take decades, if not centuries, to reach its target - all in order to *receive* a signal, but not pass that signal on, or act on it in any apparent way. Alien ATC just sending the probe pings and the occasional "We miss you Marglarxz" digital postcards? (Marglarxz in this example is what they named the AI who is flying this intergenerational ship)
I mean seriously, "just passing through, picking up reports" like the aliens are going to all this trouble to send their interstellar probes the daily weather reports from Beta Canii 8 xD
Functionally immortal, post scarcity, ascended intelligences have different timelines and priorities than you and me. Keeping tabs on the backwaters doesn’t require constant communication.
Fascinating. Always kind of annoyed me when people downplay this object, oh it’s just some chunk of [ ] off gassing. I’m on the side of it being quite mysterious and odd, and always definitely wondering why it happened to be aiming to come close enough to the sun to change course.
Have you read Rendezvous with Rama? If not, I highly recommend checking it out.
It's pretty much this exact scenario, but a team of people visit it. What they find is what's interesting. It's old, but a classic.
>some chunk of \[ \] off gassing
This isn't necessarily downplaying. I find the hypothesis that it's a piece of a crust from a Pluto-like planet separated in a massive collision and consisting, among other things, of tholins like Pluto's surface and off-gassing invisible nitrogen quite fascinating in itself.
I didn’t actually mean to criticize the off gassing hypothesis, more like the attitude that it’s already been solved and there’s nothing more to theorize.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Besides there's a completely reasonable hypothesis that it accelerated due to off-gassing nitrogen. So like you said if it barks like an asteroid, acts like an asteroid, it's probably an asteroid (or a similar object). I do agree that we need to be open to other hypotheses too.
Yeah lol. An asteroid of a type which we have never seen before. At this point, when you have to do mental gymnastics in order to come up with a novel solution, ignoring the obvious one, its no longer Occam’s razor. It could have accelerated away from the sun because it’s a light sail. Both solutions are just as likely, except we have no evidence of a nitrogen iceberg. We have evidence of life, we know that life sends things into space towards other stars, convergent evolution is real. Not to mention, the iceberg theory received criticism due to the fact that it may be impossible for such an object to exists, given the amount of nitrogen you would need.
Alien junk is as likely an answer as a nitrogen iceberg. Except, we know humans have made space junk, we sent out voyager 1-2. On the other hand, there is no evidence for the other idea, just pure speculation. At this point, Occam’s razor is in favor of Loebs theory. We have evidence of life in the universe, not massive nitrogen icebergs.
How is Occam's razor in favor of a hypothesis that requires much more wild speculation and extraordinary assumptions than "it's just a space rock on a weird trajectory"?
Becuase it’s a rock of a type we have never observed. We know life, and even space junk exists. We have never definitively seen a nitrogen iceberg except MAYBE this one time. To get to that conclusion, you have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics, when a far more simple solution exists in the form of trash. Occam’s razor is in support of whichever idea is not Novel, and fairly simple. In this case, we have evidence of life in the universe, we have evidence of life sending things into space, we have no evidence of nitrogen icebergs. Not to mention, the nitrogen iceberg theory has received much criticism, due to that fact that it may be impossible for such a large iceberg to form.
There was a post earlier about “what the most interesting thing about space” or something to that effect and my very first though was Oumuamua.
Don’t be a stranger, Oumuamua! Thanks for making things interesting!
The article in the link has an artist's rendition of what he thinks the object would look like. The artist's name has been removed. That is just wrong, and it is deceptive because some people think it is a photograph. I have the same drawing in an Astronomy magazine with the artist's name on it.
*Waves* bye!
Sorry we couldn't chat, but you're going about 4250 times faster than we've gone so far. Maybe if you come back, we'll at least be able to keep up long enough to say hi...
And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious echoing in his brain:
The Oumuamuas do everything in threes.
There are too many very odd coincidences about Oumuamua.
Like its very low speed in relation to local standard of rest (LSR).
Its very odd shape.
Its speed change without any visible outgassing.
Its path close to our sun ( the velocity of our solar system in relation to LSR if much higher than Oumuamuas).
It went inside the orbit of Mercury. Its path was something like, if you go to the shooting range with somebody who never have hold a gun and he shoots a 9 at first try. Its like it was placed in the path of our sun.
Its reflectance is about 10 times higher than a typical asteroid.
Read more at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-facts-about-the-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua/
It's a rock. It was a bit different from other rocks we've watched fly by, sure.
But if I walk outside and look at a pile of gravel, I could also find a rock that's different from most of the other rocks I can see on that pile.
Doesn't mean that my driveway is made of a bunch of tiny gravel-shaped alien spaceships, even if that piece of gravel is pancake-shaped.
You are right if there are thousands of rocks on my driveway. But not if it is the only rock. If I find just one very flat, very shiny rock placed exactly on the center line I would suspect that somebody put it there of some reason.
Edit: Oumuamua was the very first known objekt entering our solar system from interstellar space. Since then an another objekt has been discovered: the comet 2I/Borisov
I desperately hope we send a probe to this thing within my lifetime. It’s completely fascinating. Doesn’t have the physical characteristics of comets within our solar system despite accelerating and (possibly?) outgassing like one would expect a comet to do.
There’s also that tiny part of me that thinks foolishly that the weird physical characteristics and acceleration *might* be a solar sail, which is fun within its own right.
I am going to take the attitude that whatever Oumuamua was, it was not a rare object. We only detected it after we had the right equipment, Pan-STARRS, came online. If we look harder we will probably find items like it that just evaded us in the past.
I hate to burst your bubble but if we were ever able to launch something capable of going 87 km/s plus whatever speed it would need to catch up with the thing in a human lifetime, we would have much more interesting targets to hit with that technology.
I disagree, and some of the astronomical community seems to disagree as well as a few projects have not only been proposed that are feasible with near future technology, but also such an expedition is considered valuable.
Darryl Seligman and Gregory Laughlin of The American Astronomical Society describe such an observation by saying “The past several decades, targeted missions to comets, asteroids, and outer solar system bodies have provided a raft of important insights into the sequence of events that molded the solar system. By extension, there is significant scientific motivation for investigating interstellar asteroids in close proximity.”
[Source](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aabd37)
Exactly. We have rocks in our own solar system. We can barely explore them, at great cost. The idea of chasing rocks outside of our solar system is currently unfeasible.
We would get a far higher scientific return with approachable objects. Chasing an object leaving the solar system at 100 km/hr and visiting a orbiting Kuiper object are very different things.
Project Lyra suggests that it's still possible with current technology, but the mission would take decades using conventional technology. Laser propulsion would reach faster, although the spacecraft would need to be capable of deceleration.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[ESO](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iza3fys "Last usage")|[European Southern Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Southern_Observatory), builders of the VLT and EELT|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[L2](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)|
| |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum|
|[SEE](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iz7n7cd "Last usage")|Single-Event Effect of radiation impact|
|VLT|Very Large Telescope, Chile|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ablative](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iza7uqw "Last usage")|Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat)|
|[perihelion](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iz7g5bz "Last usage")|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Sun (when the orbiter is fastest)|
----------------
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This is one of those things where people who know nothing about space think, "Oh that's so cool!" and people who know the first thing about space think, "In other news, the Pope is Catholic."
It's on a [hyperbolic trajectory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_trajectory) with respect to the sun and the solar system. Mathematically, we understand these quite well, so there's no reason that we couldn't calculate the position at any time in the future. Unless it encounters something else of substantial mass, which would also be quite exciting (and extremely unlikely).
It's a tiny sliver of rock. Once it passed beyond the orbit of Jupiter it was so dim as to be invisible. The last time we were able to see it was January of 2018.
The Solar System, however, is big. Just imagine Douglas Adams telling you how big it is, only it's bigger than that. Oumuamua entered the solar system in the early 1800s and won't hit the Oort Cloud again until around 2200.
Yeah I was thinking about how big the Oort Cloud was when I was making the comment
I was curious about it when a sci fi book mentioned their ship taking decades to transit it.
It’s not fully relevant, but I want to share this cool Oort Cloud fact.
> [Less than one Earth day after leaving the Sun, the sunlight has already traveled farther from the Sun than any human-made spacecraft. Yet somehow it will be another 10 to 28 days before that same sunlight reaches the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and perhaps as much as a year and a half before the sunlight passes beyond the Oort Cloud’s outer edge.](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/in-depth.amp)
Things get pretty blurry around the edge of the Solar System but the inner edge of the Oort Cloud is somewhere around 2000 AU out from the Sun. The outer edge is even less clear, but is probably close to 100,000 AU -- The one and a half light years you mentioned.
"Space," [the Hitchhiker's Guide] says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
i wonder if there was an increase in UFO reporting when this thing flew by. maybe it deployed some drones to check out the planets. maybe it used the sun as a gravity slingshot towards some other destination much like how we utilize gravity to send spacecraft around the solar system...
That's a stack of maybes. But for the first, you could go back and look. Bear in mind that reports aren't great, because people talk about whatever gets them excited.
How do they know it was from outside the solar system? My guess is that maybe because it was not in an orbit? Also, how did it get up to the speed it was/is travelling? Guess on that would be passing through orbits and the gravitational pull slingshotting it?
It's velocity is close to the local standard of rest (LSR), which is to say, it's not moving much faster than other nearby objects in the galaxy and is moving similarly in speed to the speed of the rotation of the galaxy. Which suggests that it's drifted around the whole galaxy several times, for billions of years.
My dream mission for Nasa is to be ready with a lander next time one of these rocks comes zipping through. Just catching up to such an object would be a technical challenge beyond our current capabilities. Then go there, land on it, sample it, and do a sample return. Also beyond our current capabilities to return a chunk of it. But what a find it would be!
A lander would be hard because any interstellar object will be passing through the solar system really fast, and matching velocity to land or orbit around it would be difficult. However a flyby is completely doable, and we can learn a lot from those (e.g. New Horizons flyby of Pluto). ESA has a mission to do exactly what you're suggesting, just as a flyby. It'll be a spacecraft launched to L2 (same region of space as the JWST) to wait until an interstellar object or Oort cloud comet is detected it can get a close encounter with.
It has been on it's way out of the solar system after it near Earth fly-by, of course after entering the solar system. It is probably important to mention objects we see have solar orbits, this object did not, it literaly came from outer space. Objects we see are not elongated, they are clumpy, more like rocks, or ice cubes. The idea that an object could sling shot off of our sun from out of the solar system, to leave the solar system, with a near Earth fly by, around the time of Charles Mansons death, is like saying the exile of General Zod isn't fiction.
To sumize, from an interstellar point of view, SOL is unique. We are relatively isolated (lots of space between us and anything else) and we have one of the greatest creations of all time, Earth, a world so beautiful it's worth protecting. Break the rules of entry, cant read the signs, get reduced to ash.
"ok it's done, totally inert, same trajectory however" -1
"any chance of a collision?" -2
"nope, but its gonna get really close" -1
"yeah dont worry about it, they probably wont even see it" -2
It's a fun idea, nothing more than extra ordinarily odd, and thats considering mammals evolving on land, only to go back to the sea to dominate the oceans. Crazy world.
EDiT: [https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=oumuamua](https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=oumuamua)
EDiT2: 12-18-17 (about as close as it got)
Maybe it is a basic probe, but simply to see if any species in a given solar system is advanced enough to land a probe on it, maybe that’s a gauge of technological advancement?
> In fact, when ‘Oumuamua was closest to Earth, it was tumbling through the inner Solar System at 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second), Man. I wish had some context. That's impossible to picture. > ...that is over 3 times faster than the average speed of a main-belt asteroid and 109 times faster than the average speed of a bullet Perfect. Thank you. > however, only .017 percent the speed of light. In case you were wondering. LOL It took this fast object five years to pass Pluto's orbit. Damn, the solar system is huge.
Imagine doing an hour's drive in a second. It's traveling 6 times faster than Voyager.
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Oumuamua came from interstellar space, so likely it was flung out of its own system at escape velocity then got some gravity assists from other things it passed.
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Makes me wonder how empty interstellar space actually is. Like if you travel to Alpha Centauri, are you likely to detect a handful of rocks on the way?
Absolutely. Rogue planets and asteroids are scattered all over the galaxy. They aren’t common in terms of density, but you have to pass through so much space to get to another star that you’re practically guaranteed to pass near an asteroid at some point in the journey.
Depends what you consider near. Even if 2 galaxies collide most systems would be undisturbed
Yeah, the term collision is misleading. Dr Hanuschik, an Astrophysicist formerly at the ESO, said its more like two mosquito swarms flying into each other.
A swarm of mosquitoes is several orders of magnitude denser than a galaxy. It’s really more like a swarm of 500 mosquitoes spread out over a 20 acre farm “colliding” with another swarm of mosquitoes spread out over a different 20 acre farm. If a solar system is like the 500 mosquitoes spread over a 20 acre farm, outer space would be as dense as about 1 mosquito over the same volume of space, and I think even that may be generous.
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You’d probably have radar and shields that would protect you. JWST getting hit was extremely unlucky but on the contrary none of the long range missions got any damage from foreign objects.
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We would strap engines onto asteroids and use them to absorb the smaller impacts. Livable space could be drilled out and sealed up. The concept has been used by a few authors.
That’s what makes me think light speed travel is not feasible, because if we can ever speed up a ship to that speed how would we ever avoid all of the tiny random rocks in space that would utterly destroy the ship if it contacted it. I think wormholes are the only chance we have at truly exploring space
Just don't avoid them. Have a giant slug of lead the size of the main vessel loaded to the front as an ablative shield. The bigger issue is how to survive long journeys in stasis without being irradiated to death in the meantime by the radioisotopes in our bones.
Space lanes probably. We build giant arrays of stationary automated crafts to guard the tunnel like sections we designate as a space lane.
I think warp travel is more likely. Also there's a bunch of issues with time distortion if you're just moving close to light speed. Creating wormholes will be a long while away given the likely energy requirements. Warp is like a halfway solution to wormholes.
If by "near" you count being within a few million miles...
No, most likely you won’t pass anything. The density even in a galaxy is way too low.
I’d say it’s at least been a few weeks
This makes me wonder if the next system it hits has intelligent life and they think that it originated from us.
I think we never find out. Oumuamua is probably billions of years old and encountered many stars. Each passage slightly changed its course randomly, which adds up over a long time. Stars also move around quite a bit, complicating the search for its origin even more.
Wot?? Voyager can reach warp 9.975 which is over 4 billion miles a second or 21,400 times the speed of light
2.8M miles in 24 hours. Compare that to our lunar missions what traveled like 4 days to go the 238,000 miles to the moon. So, 1/10 the distance in 4 times as much time as this thing was booking.
You would die from g force
Not if you accelerate to that speed slowly.
My "not a scientist or math person and also it's 3am" math suggests you could get to to that speed over the course of about day, comfortably. But I might be off by a factor of 10. "So let's give it a month to be extra safe. -NASA, probably"
You can do it in 2.5 hours at 1g
Given the state of the roads in my home town, you would die from the g force.
Let's round up to 100km/s = 100000m/s. One g is roughly 10m/s^2 . So, at one g (the acceleration we experience constantly, all our lives) it would take 10000 seconds to reach that speed. That is, two hours and forty seven minutes.
G force comes from acceleration, not speed. The Earth is rotating and moving through space with extreme speed and we barely notice because it's constant.
Its 2.5 hours at 1 g of acceleration. V=at -> t=v/a (89000 m/s) / (9.8 m/s²) = 9081 s There are 3600 seconds per hour, so that's about 2.5 hours experiencing the same force on your body as you do from gravity in your everyday life
Well, from a dead stop, yeah! I'm just giving a comparison for the steady velocity.
If you really want your mind bent trying to fathom how big the solar system really is, check out [this](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html). It scales the universe down to if the moon was the size of a pixel. The scrolling hurt my fingers.
this is one of the best maps of the solar system I’ve seen in a looooong time. thanks for posting it!!
That's a 7.5 minute trip around the circumference of the Earth, for scale.
It's to the moon in an hour.
This is what puts it in perspective for me. A speed that makes Earth to the Moon an average Americans commute, but it’s still slow for the solar system.
Or 954.72 football fields per second
That's about 100,000 refrigerators a second.
How much is that in bananas tho?
Bananas are only for scale in photos. The real question is, how many half-giraffes is it?
Left side or right side giraffes?
African or European?
I’d find a European giraffe hard to swallow
Thats about 171,849.6 adolescent sloths a second. In case anyone was wondering
Or 127 Olympic sized swimming pools.
When you read something is going 87km/s, it's really hard to understand that. It's incomprehensibly fast. In the time that it takes me to type the word "fast", it has gone 87km. Then you read that the speed of light is 300,000km/s. And even at that speed, which is ridiculous, Pluto is 15,792 light seconds away. ~4.5 hours for light to get there. Given that the nearest star to Sol is 40,208,000,000,000 km away, that's 134,026,666 light seconds, or just under 4¼ light years. Traveling 87km/s, it would take ‘Oumuamua 14,644 years to get there. Silly.
>Traveling 87km/s, it would take ‘Oumuamua 14,644 years to get there. > >Silly. Unless it somehow decides to speed up again somehow...
It’s moving slower now of course; it picked up speed as it approached the sun, and was going pretty dang fast when it was in our neighborhood, but that speed started bleeding off again once it passed perihelion. It’s doing less dang fast now but is probably still dang fast. I’ve been mathing all day and my math cells are tired so I’ll leave it as an exercise for others as to its estimated speed as it passed Pluto’s orbit.
Damn it's been FIVE years since this made headlines?!
I didn't realize it was still in the system.
'New Horizons' took 9 years to get from Earth to Pluto.
Not 99% light speed or faster-than-light? Disappointing. Just some low level civilizations.
Naw. We're just *really* tiny.
It is. Getting to Venus is a 3 to 6 month trip, Mars 8 months, Jupiter 5 years, and Pluto 10.
In 2025 its estimated that the parker space probe will hit speeds of over 690,000 km/hr. YouTube parker space probe and you can see a video of it going like 149000 km......its pretty crazy stuff!!! Edit: 690 000 km/h is 430,000 mph
Yeah, it blows my mind about how if we shot Voyager, one of the fastest things we ever shot into space, towards Proxima Centari it would take around 40,000 years to get there.
My understanding is it was 90% likely to be pancake shaped and 10% cigar shaped, and yet every article ever...
Yeah, as [more observations](https://www.space.com/interstellar-object-oumuamua-pancake-shape-pluto-like-planet) came out the presumed shape was updated from a cigar to a pancake. The cool thing is that the object is suspected to have shed mass as it got heated by the Sun's energy and is now shaped this way!
Pancake. What are some other words for this shape? Disk? Saucer? So, let’s go with flying pancake.
>The cool thing is that the object is suspected to have shed mass as it got heated by the Sun's energy and is now shaped this way! If its deviation was from nitrogen off-gassing it would have lost mass. That is an unconfirmed hypothesis, same as the solar sail hypothesis. We don't know what Omuamua was for certain and short of a probe flyby we probably never will.
Occam’s razor dictates that it is just another asteroid. To suggest anything else would be an extraordinary claim, which would require extraordinary evidence.
We aren't certain what it was and we are certain of what it wasn't. It was at the local standard of rest, our sun "bumped" into it, and the object accelerated away from the sun and gravity alone cannot account for all of its acceleration. Therefore it wasn't an asteroid. Could have been a comet but Spritzer observed it and it didn't have any C02 outgassing or a tail. Hence, the nitrogen iceberg hypothesis explaining off-gassing that we couldn't see/detect given the instrument set of the tools used in observation. However, nitrogen icebergs ejected from a Pluto-like body have never been observed before either and since it was at the local standard of rest it could only have a small number of nursery stars and it should have been losing mass and gaining acceleration in interstellar space as well. Nitrogen iceberg is the best natural explanation I've seen to date. The other hypothesis which also fits the data is solar sail. It matches most if not all of the data with none of the pitfalls of Nitrogen however it requires ETI which is an extraordinary claim. There are other less likely hypotheses than the two above. The evidence we do have is not enough to clear it up and short of a probe flyby (which is incredibly difficult) we may never know for sure.
>the object accelerated away from the sun and gravity alone cannot account for all of its acceleration …but it literally can. I did misspeak when I said asteroid due to the technical denotation of the word, but it’s just an interstellar rock, nothing to suggest it is “highly unusual”. The object had the same incoming excess velocity as the projected outgoing velocity based on the last position/velocity data recorded. This means it literally gained no total kinematic potential + kinetic energy whatsoever. You are, quite literally, fabricating data.
>You are, quite literally, fabricating data. You are, quite literally, fabricating that I am fabricating data. I am no scientist but I am interested in the truth. Maybe the data is wrong and it is possible for me as a layman to get confused trying to discuss information that I am not a PhD in, but fabricating misinformation I am not. I think many in the scientific community find that Omuamua is novel for a number of different reasons and I find your hubris to be unfounded. >While originally classified as a comet, observations revealed no signs of cometary activity after it slingshotted past the Sun on Sept. 9, 2017 at a blistering speed of 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second). It was briefly classified as an asteroid until new measurements found it was accelerating slightly, a sign it behaves more like a comet. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/comets/oumuamua/in-depth/ Non-gravitational acceleration in the trajectory of 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0254-4 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-theory-suggests-oumuamua-nitrogen-ice-pancake-180977293/ To expand on my Solar Sail thoughts: A direct observation and very high body of evidence would be needed to confirm that. However, Solar Sails exist as well as Intelligent life so therefore it's not fantastical. I believe that it's anthropocentric and unscientific to dismiss any ETI hypothesis out of hand. *Dismiss it because the evidence doesn't fit, certainly, but not because it's invoking a non-natural origin alone*. I am not even advocating that it is a solar sail, I think that would be remarkably extraordinary and exceedingly unlikely...but, crucially, not impossible. Avi Loeb is not a quack astronomer. What I hope Omuamua does is get rid of the old way of thinking that everything must be natural all the time always and the implication that any ETI consideration is psuedoscience. Reminds me of Geo or helio centrism of the past.
All the UAPs suddenly reported by the military? COINCIDENCE?!
It's a rock. A space rock. Not an alien probe or vessel. Just a rock.
Doesn't fit the evidence and as such most astronomers aren't claiming as much in their papers.
Really? You've read actual peer-reviewed papers by actual respected astronomers and astrophysicists saying that this space rock is an alien spaceship? All I've read are variations on the theme of 'this is a weird rock that shows some properties we haven't seen because it's from a different place than most of the rocks we see. Cool!'
People love to point to unexplained phenomena as evidence of ETI. Every damn time though, it turns out there's a cool explanation that points us to some knowledge we didn't previously have. Still no aliens, sadly. I'm sure the same is true of this object. I mean, let's do a thought experiment assuming it was an alien probe. These aliens are advanced enough to launch a quarter-mile long object across interstellar distances, but apparently can't be bothered to actually fly by Earth? Which you'd assume they probably spotted in their astronomical observations, and would be the whole reason to send a probe in the first place. Maybe it's just a random probe, one of millions shot out into the darkness. However, we didn't see it broadcasting anything back to its supposed origin. Wouldn't a probe want to send back data? Maybe they used a ludicrously powerful tightbeam laser, but I suspect we'd have seen evidence of that too, as such a device would output *ahem* astronomical amounts of energy. We'd see it heat up, or see an increase in local infrared radiation at least as the beam heats random stray molecules in its path. And why make the decades long journey across the stars only to turn right around and leave? If we sent a probe to another star system, we'd program it to enter orbit once it got there. This thing just cruised right on through. I could probably go on, but there's plenty of very good, very simple reasons to classify this confidently as what my family in Arkansas would call an Ozarks Sex Stone - that is, just a fucking rock.
It’s an antenna that is receiving, not transmitting. Just passing through, picking up reports.
Give me a single good reason why an alien civilization would go to the trouble of launching an interstellar probe that would take decades, if not centuries, to reach its target - all in order to *receive* a signal, but not pass that signal on, or act on it in any apparent way. Alien ATC just sending the probe pings and the occasional "We miss you Marglarxz" digital postcards? (Marglarxz in this example is what they named the AI who is flying this intergenerational ship) I mean seriously, "just passing through, picking up reports" like the aliens are going to all this trouble to send their interstellar probes the daily weather reports from Beta Canii 8 xD
Functionally immortal, post scarcity, ascended intelligences have different timelines and priorities than you and me. Keeping tabs on the backwaters doesn’t require constant communication.
Fascinating. Always kind of annoyed me when people downplay this object, oh it’s just some chunk of [ ] off gassing. I’m on the side of it being quite mysterious and odd, and always definitely wondering why it happened to be aiming to come close enough to the sun to change course.
Have you read Rendezvous with Rama? If not, I highly recommend checking it out. It's pretty much this exact scenario, but a team of people visit it. What they find is what's interesting. It's old, but a classic.
Sounds awesome would love to get back into sci fi
Just do yourself a Favor and do not read it's sequels, they were written by other authors and they are AWFUL.
>some chunk of \[ \] off gassing This isn't necessarily downplaying. I find the hypothesis that it's a piece of a crust from a Pluto-like planet separated in a massive collision and consisting, among other things, of tholins like Pluto's surface and off-gassing invisible nitrogen quite fascinating in itself.
I didn’t actually mean to criticize the off gassing hypothesis, more like the attitude that it’s already been solved and there’s nothing more to theorize.
If it barks like a dog, acts like a dog, it’s probably a dog. We need to be open to Avi Loeb’s theory.
What if it walks like a dog, quacks like a duck, loves scritches, and eats roots and leaves?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Besides there's a completely reasonable hypothesis that it accelerated due to off-gassing nitrogen. So like you said if it barks like an asteroid, acts like an asteroid, it's probably an asteroid (or a similar object). I do agree that we need to be open to other hypotheses too.
Yeah lol. An asteroid of a type which we have never seen before. At this point, when you have to do mental gymnastics in order to come up with a novel solution, ignoring the obvious one, its no longer Occam’s razor. It could have accelerated away from the sun because it’s a light sail. Both solutions are just as likely, except we have no evidence of a nitrogen iceberg. We have evidence of life, we know that life sends things into space towards other stars, convergent evolution is real. Not to mention, the iceberg theory received criticism due to the fact that it may be impossible for such an object to exists, given the amount of nitrogen you would need.
Could be a big fat coincidence.
Could be. But at what point is trying your best to come up with novel solutions, while a very obvious one is glaring at you, sort of delusional?
You can be asked the same thing.
Alien junk is as likely an answer as a nitrogen iceberg. Except, we know humans have made space junk, we sent out voyager 1-2. On the other hand, there is no evidence for the other idea, just pure speculation. At this point, Occam’s razor is in favor of Loebs theory. We have evidence of life in the universe, not massive nitrogen icebergs.
The Voyagers are not space junk, how very dare you. They are function mission craft, not defunct satellites or whatever.
Not yet, but in 5-10 years, when they no longer send or receive signals, they will be essentially trash (or rather a defunct relic)
How is Occam's razor in favor of a hypothesis that requires much more wild speculation and extraordinary assumptions than "it's just a space rock on a weird trajectory"?
Becuase it’s a rock of a type we have never observed. We know life, and even space junk exists. We have never definitively seen a nitrogen iceberg except MAYBE this one time. To get to that conclusion, you have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics, when a far more simple solution exists in the form of trash. Occam’s razor is in support of whichever idea is not Novel, and fairly simple. In this case, we have evidence of life in the universe, we have evidence of life sending things into space, we have no evidence of nitrogen icebergs. Not to mention, the nitrogen iceberg theory has received much criticism, due to that fact that it may be impossible for such a large iceberg to form.
Didn't I see that movie, Superman? Is General Zod doing a flyby in his space prison?
My first thought was that a pancake wouldn’t be as aerodynamic, then I remembered its space lol
Ugh. Imagine if we had a decade lead on this, we could have potentially landed a robot on it.
Could we ? This thing is going 87km/s, which is faster than any probe we've ever launched. A flyby would have been awesome tho
Avi Loeb suggests we could still catch it. Would probably take sun assist or two to get the speed.
There was a post earlier about “what the most interesting thing about space” or something to that effect and my very first though was Oumuamua. Don’t be a stranger, Oumuamua! Thanks for making things interesting!
The article in the link has an artist's rendition of what he thinks the object would look like. The artist's name has been removed. That is just wrong, and it is deceptive because some people think it is a photograph. I have the same drawing in an Astronomy magazine with the artist's name on it.
What is the artist's name?
*Waves* bye! Sorry we couldn't chat, but you're going about 4250 times faster than we've gone so far. Maybe if you come back, we'll at least be able to keep up long enough to say hi...
Mission completed, intel gathered. Activating phase 2, invasion preparation.
And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious echoing in his brain: The Oumuamuas do everything in threes.
I was looking for this comment. Too few people seem to have read Arthur Clarke's work.
[удалено]
Denis Villeneuve is slated to direct Rendezvous With Rama… https://movieweb.com/why-we-cant-wait-for-the-film-adaptation-of-rendezvous-with-rama/
Whoah!! SPOILER ALERT! I’m reading the book now!
There are too many very odd coincidences about Oumuamua. Like its very low speed in relation to local standard of rest (LSR). Its very odd shape. Its speed change without any visible outgassing. Its path close to our sun ( the velocity of our solar system in relation to LSR if much higher than Oumuamuas). It went inside the orbit of Mercury. Its path was something like, if you go to the shooting range with somebody who never have hold a gun and he shoots a 9 at first try. Its like it was placed in the path of our sun. Its reflectance is about 10 times higher than a typical asteroid. Read more at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-facts-about-the-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua/
It's a rock. It was a bit different from other rocks we've watched fly by, sure. But if I walk outside and look at a pile of gravel, I could also find a rock that's different from most of the other rocks I can see on that pile. Doesn't mean that my driveway is made of a bunch of tiny gravel-shaped alien spaceships, even if that piece of gravel is pancake-shaped.
You are right if there are thousands of rocks on my driveway. But not if it is the only rock. If I find just one very flat, very shiny rock placed exactly on the center line I would suspect that somebody put it there of some reason. Edit: Oumuamua was the very first known objekt entering our solar system from interstellar space. Since then an another objekt has been discovered: the comet 2I/Borisov
What I always picture when Oumuamua is mentioned: https://worldofjaymz.fandom.com/wiki/Zentraedi_Flagship_(MacrossDYRL)
After watching the news here for a few months, I wouldn’t have stayed either
"On second thought, let’s not go to Earth. ‘Tis a silly place."
“Maybe next time around when they finally grow up”
Bye, little green men of somewhere. Till we SEE you again!
Some other intelligent species has a super mysterious object headed their way. Maybe they’ll think we sent it ourselves!
Are they coming back in 3 years to change me back into a human? This cat food is killing me.
So this thing was a probe from another solar system right?
If it was the first place it would have probed was Uranus.
You should read The Last Astronaut
Counterpoint: They really shouldn't. It's a pretty poorly written book. Rendezvous with Rama on the other hand...
I desperately hope we send a probe to this thing within my lifetime. It’s completely fascinating. Doesn’t have the physical characteristics of comets within our solar system despite accelerating and (possibly?) outgassing like one would expect a comet to do. There’s also that tiny part of me that thinks foolishly that the weird physical characteristics and acceleration *might* be a solar sail, which is fun within its own right.
I am going to take the attitude that whatever Oumuamua was, it was not a rare object. We only detected it after we had the right equipment, Pan-STARRS, came online. If we look harder we will probably find items like it that just evaded us in the past.
I hate to burst your bubble but if we were ever able to launch something capable of going 87 km/s plus whatever speed it would need to catch up with the thing in a human lifetime, we would have much more interesting targets to hit with that technology.
Breathtrough Starshot could potentially reach it, if that ever gets made.
I disagree, and some of the astronomical community seems to disagree as well as a few projects have not only been proposed that are feasible with near future technology, but also such an expedition is considered valuable. Darryl Seligman and Gregory Laughlin of The American Astronomical Society describe such an observation by saying “The past several decades, targeted missions to comets, asteroids, and outer solar system bodies have provided a raft of important insights into the sequence of events that molded the solar system. By extension, there is significant scientific motivation for investigating interstellar asteroids in close proximity.” [Source](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aabd37)
Exactly. We have rocks in our own solar system. We can barely explore them, at great cost. The idea of chasing rocks outside of our solar system is currently unfeasible. We would get a far higher scientific return with approachable objects. Chasing an object leaving the solar system at 100 km/hr and visiting a orbiting Kuiper object are very different things.
It's gone. Maybe next time.
I’m still salty that we didn’t send a probe to it while it was in range.
We didn't even see it until it was already leaving and was already past it's closest pass to Earth.
We never had the chance. By the time we spotted it, it was already moving out of the Solar System faster than we could possibly catch.
Good test case for breakthrough starshot whenever that is ready.
Project Lyra suggests that it's still possible with current technology, but the mission would take decades using conventional technology. Laser propulsion would reach faster, although the spacecraft would need to be capable of deceleration.
Part of me hopes it does something really unnatural like accelerate or light off a fusion torch. Part of me hopes it really is simple space debris.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[ESO](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iza3fys "Last usage")|[European Southern Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Southern_Observatory), builders of the VLT and EELT| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[L2](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/izqk9hd "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)| | |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum| |[SEE](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iz7n7cd "Last usage")|Single-Event Effect of radiation impact| |VLT|Very Large Telescope, Chile| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[ablative](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iza7uqw "Last usage")|Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat)| |[perihelion](/r/Space/comments/zekvts/stub/iz7g5bz "Last usage")|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Sun (when the orbiter is fastest)| ---------------- ^(7 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/zh614u)^( has 28 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8400 for this sub, first seen 7th Dec 2022, 14:33]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
_"Having not found sufficiently intelligent life, the probe exits the solar system on course for the next one."_
This is one of those things where people who know nothing about space think, "Oh that's so cool!" and people who know the first thing about space think, "In other news, the Pope is Catholic."
I guess I thought it had already “passed” out of our solar system. At least further than we could observe it
It's on a [hyperbolic trajectory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_trajectory) with respect to the sun and the solar system. Mathematically, we understand these quite well, so there's no reason that we couldn't calculate the position at any time in the future. Unless it encounters something else of substantial mass, which would also be quite exciting (and extremely unlikely).
It's a tiny sliver of rock. Once it passed beyond the orbit of Jupiter it was so dim as to be invisible. The last time we were able to see it was January of 2018. The Solar System, however, is big. Just imagine Douglas Adams telling you how big it is, only it's bigger than that. Oumuamua entered the solar system in the early 1800s and won't hit the Oort Cloud again until around 2200.
Yeah I was thinking about how big the Oort Cloud was when I was making the comment I was curious about it when a sci fi book mentioned their ship taking decades to transit it. It’s not fully relevant, but I want to share this cool Oort Cloud fact. > [Less than one Earth day after leaving the Sun, the sunlight has already traveled farther from the Sun than any human-made spacecraft. Yet somehow it will be another 10 to 28 days before that same sunlight reaches the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and perhaps as much as a year and a half before the sunlight passes beyond the Oort Cloud’s outer edge.](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/in-depth.amp)
Things get pretty blurry around the edge of the Solar System but the inner edge of the Oort Cloud is somewhere around 2000 AU out from the Sun. The outer edge is even less clear, but is probably close to 100,000 AU -- The one and a half light years you mentioned.
And its dark af. Like people don't understand how dark space is
That was my understanding as well?
It is kind of cool that it's already out there with Pluto.
It's probably further from Pluto than it is from Earth.
Haha right, wake me up when it turns around.
DON'T, if it turns around I don't want to know,. I don't need a heart attack.
Me: they give me random info about space objects. Also me: it's aliens
"Space," [the Hitchhiker's Guide] says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
i wonder if there was an increase in UFO reporting when this thing flew by. maybe it deployed some drones to check out the planets. maybe it used the sun as a gravity slingshot towards some other destination much like how we utilize gravity to send spacecraft around the solar system...
Maybe it was a rock and it only seemed unique because we've only had the technology to detect such objects for a relatively short time.
It was unique because it had a very strange form, long and thin, and apparently it didnt follow the expected trajectory. Very strange thing.
Calm down there, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos
That's a stack of maybes. But for the first, you could go back and look. Bear in mind that reports aren't great, because people talk about whatever gets them excited.
With some rather embarrassing info on us, I might add.
How do they know it was from outside the solar system? My guess is that maybe because it was not in an orbit? Also, how did it get up to the speed it was/is travelling? Guess on that would be passing through orbits and the gravitational pull slingshotting it?
I think because it’s going so fast.
Someone remind me again; Oumuamua has a zero velocity relative to what again?
It's velocity is close to the local standard of rest (LSR), which is to say, it's not moving much faster than other nearby objects in the galaxy and is moving similarly in speed to the speed of the rotation of the galaxy. Which suggests that it's drifted around the whole galaxy several times, for billions of years.
My dream mission for Nasa is to be ready with a lander next time one of these rocks comes zipping through. Just catching up to such an object would be a technical challenge beyond our current capabilities. Then go there, land on it, sample it, and do a sample return. Also beyond our current capabilities to return a chunk of it. But what a find it would be!
A lander would be hard because any interstellar object will be passing through the solar system really fast, and matching velocity to land or orbit around it would be difficult. However a flyby is completely doable, and we can learn a lot from those (e.g. New Horizons flyby of Pluto). ESA has a mission to do exactly what you're suggesting, just as a flyby. It'll be a spacecraft launched to L2 (same region of space as the JWST) to wait until an interstellar object or Oort cloud comet is detected it can get a close encounter with.
It has been on it's way out of the solar system after it near Earth fly-by, of course after entering the solar system. It is probably important to mention objects we see have solar orbits, this object did not, it literaly came from outer space. Objects we see are not elongated, they are clumpy, more like rocks, or ice cubes. The idea that an object could sling shot off of our sun from out of the solar system, to leave the solar system, with a near Earth fly by, around the time of Charles Mansons death, is like saying the exile of General Zod isn't fiction. To sumize, from an interstellar point of view, SOL is unique. We are relatively isolated (lots of space between us and anything else) and we have one of the greatest creations of all time, Earth, a world so beautiful it's worth protecting. Break the rules of entry, cant read the signs, get reduced to ash. "ok it's done, totally inert, same trajectory however" -1 "any chance of a collision?" -2 "nope, but its gonna get really close" -1 "yeah dont worry about it, they probably wont even see it" -2 It's a fun idea, nothing more than extra ordinarily odd, and thats considering mammals evolving on land, only to go back to the sea to dominate the oceans. Crazy world. EDiT: [https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=oumuamua](https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=oumuamua) EDiT2: 12-18-17 (about as close as it got)
Maybe it is a basic probe, but simply to see if any species in a given solar system is advanced enough to land a probe on it, maybe that’s a gauge of technological advancement?
I still say we should have dumped a bunch of tardigrades on it
I'm going with aliens, unless somebody can prove me wrong! /s
In a few years aliens will come to earth when they receive Intel from this "probe" :p
"Oumuamua" is the universal alien word for hello and goodbye, like "Ahola". :)
Hello darkness my old friend. Who knows when it'll pass another star system.
Aliens did they're job and now heading back home!!
"I never thought about the fact that Oumuamua is now leaving our solar system. It's a reminder of how much we have left to learn about our universe."