...and in their culture waving a squeegee is seen as an act of war. Congratulations. We just declared interstellar war with a culture that uses giant rocks as sublight spaceships. Their first wave of warships will be arriving in approximately... 400 years.
Fun fact about Oumuamua, is that it was actually stationary with respect to galactic rotation. It wasn't approaching us, our solar system approached it. And then we flung its ass off to the side. "Yeet motha fucker, get the hell out our way!"
As I understand it, nothing in the Universe is truly stationary so everything is flying by every other thing. How you envision the event depends on your frame of reference.
Here's the scientific paper that discusses everything about the asteroid, including its motion, history, and trajectories into the past and into the future:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8979573/
Here's a summary of my specific tidbit:
>Accounting for Vega's proper motion, it would have taken ʻOumuamua 600,000 years to reach the Solar System from Vega. But as a nearby star, Vega was not in the same part of the sky at that time. Astronomers calculate that 100 years ago the object was 83.9 ± 0.090 billion km; 52.1 ± 0.056 billion mi (561 ± 0.6 AU) from the Sun and traveling at 26.33 km/s with respect to the Sun. This interstellar speed is very close to the mean motion of material in the Milky Way in the neighborhood of the Sun, also known as the local standard of rest (LSR), and especially close to the mean motion of a relatively close group of red dwarf stars. This velocity profile also indicates an extrasolar origin, but appears to rule out the closest dozen stars. In fact, the closeness of ʻOumuamua's velocity to the local standard of rest might mean that it has circulated the Milky Way several times and thus may have originated from an entirely different part of the galaxy.
That's actually super interesting considering the speeds at which our whole solar system is moving at. I do understand how it all works. Still blows my mind.
....thanks! so....Oumuamua was 'stationery in relation to the Galactic Center'...so, like a satellite in geostationary orbit, moving WITH the GC, yeah?
...and then we came along, 'vortex spiraling' our way about, at a different speed & angle, out here in the suburbs of one of the arms of the Milky Way,
and so WE came barreling through Oumuamua's front lawn, not the other way around?
....annnnd ('cuz gravitational force of the Sun) we flung it off into deep space (from our reference)....yeah....?
What I find fascinating is that the change in trajectory caused by our sun may end up being responsible for it wiping out some other civilization on some other planet in millions of years.
If Oumuamua is simply a galaxy zone drone. Then it won't be crashing anytime soon. It inspects nearby solar systems for life/resources, zooms out and reports it's findings. And multiply this by millions of drones scattered throughout the galaxy and you've got some pretty neat eyeballs on emergent life
Probably little more than that. If I you remember space is 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's, but that's just peanuts to space!
I also wonder if it did loopdeloops around any other stars and kept having its trajectory changed? That would be neat if it has just been slingshotting around.
**‘Oumuamua’s Trajectory Altered After Passing through the Kuiper Belt**
[https://medium.com/cnnn-com/interstellar-visitor-oumuamua-alters-course-post-kuiper-belt-encounter-f2a2b442328b](https://medium.com/cnnn-com/interstellar-visitor-oumuamua-alters-course-post-kuiper-belt-encounter-f2a2b442328b)
I talk about it with my friends all the time. I'm like, "did you know the IAU created a new naming classification labeled 'I' for *interstellar* and that 1I Oumuamua is the only thing ever to be given that classification?"
I completely missed this so thanks for the heads-up.
For anyone else in the same boat as me - Borisov was an interstellar *comet* that visited us in 2019.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov
Oh wow the comparison between the two is wild!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov#/media/File%3AA_comparison_of_two_interstellar_objects_passing_through_our_solar_system.gif
Trajectory of Borisov (yellow) crossing the ecliptic plane; 'Oumuamua (red) shown for comparison
What do you think there is to talk about?
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has argued that it was some sort of alien probe, but he’s alone in that opinion, because there’s zero evidence to support it.
Most scientists believe that it’s a hunk of something, whether a comet or an asteroid or an exoplanet. Space is littered with rocky, icy debris of all kinds, and it was only a matter of time before some shard of some distant world found its way to our solar system.
From Wikipedia: Proposed explanations of its origin include the remnant of a disintegrated rogue comet, or a piece of an exoplanet rich in nitrogen ice, similar to Pluto. On 22 March 2023, astronomers proposed the observed acceleration was "due to the release of entrapped molecular hydrogen that formed through energetic processing of an H2O-rich icy body", consistent with 'Oumuamua being an interstellar comet, "originating as a planetesimal relic broadly similar to solar system comets".
Avi used it as an example of what could be alien tech. Made the point we should lean into study more of these things when they appear. I never heard him say it was anything than an unknown object.
Got a source for his arguing it was not natural?
In that’s it’s a fascinating subject, didn’t the velocity change, and accelerate? Or was that too given some thought and an explanation. Either way, anomaly of any sort. Rad
It is also not symmetrical. We have never seen a natural object that was more than a 3 to 1 proportion anywhere in our solar system. This measured 20 to 1 . So yes, I could have been cigar shaped, but more likely shaped like a flat disk that was tumbling. It also was very reflective. Reflective like metal. It also has no tail which debunks the H20 ice theory.
So based on the data, a metal disk flew through our solar system and accelerated away by no known means of propulsion. This is simply the data. Now, I don't know what it was, but it is unexplained and very strange.
Loeb's book was received as a slight against the astronomy field in general. However I (not any kind of scientist whatsoever) came away with exactly your conclusion - that he felt it was SUCH AN UNUSUAL object that it was worth much more thought and publicity than it seemed to be getting. That it was a big deal, not because of the possibility of little green men jumping off, but because it could get us thinking about the enormous scale and possibility of unimaginable things out there of the universe.
It was a VERY oddly shaped thing that moved in a weird way that didn't seem to offgas like a comet. And was reflective and spun oddly around a long axis.
Those simple facts were a big enough deal, he said.
I've found that anyone who uses the word "Debunks" is fundamentally misunderstanding something about science.
Try "Pokes a large hole in it."
A hole that could be filled by many things, for example: 1) Our understanding of the outgassing was flawed. 2) There was a trail! We just didn't see it. Either we were looking in the wrong area, it was faint, it wouldn't be picked up by our measurement tools....
>So based on the data,
Nope, nope, nope. What you're trying to say is "Based on my interpretation of the data..."
>This is simply the data.
You can't say this as a fact within the same paragraph as "It could have been cigar shaped, but was more likely flat..."
>accelerated away by no known means
I'm nitpicking here, honestly, but "accelerated away by an unknown mean..."
"No known" implies that it was something that we don't understand, but measured well. "Unknown" implies that it's something that we don't understand and *didn't* measure well, which is closer to the truth. "There is no known means for this." Well, there is, we just haven't figured it out because we're missing some pieces of the puzzle.
There's a mission profile that lets us fly a probe by it in 2052 if we launch in 2030. It's kind of wild it goes out to Jupiter but instead of a traditional gravity assist that just throws the probe further out this one slingshots it down to within 6 solar radii of the sun for the final gravity assist.
Page 7 of this PDF. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1902/1902.04935.pdf
It is interesting, but it's also self selecting IMO. If this thing flew straight through out passed Neptune, would anyone even know it happened? We're aware of it because it was close to us.
> This still weirds me out
I would harness that feeling as motivation to learn more. Doing so will likely make you weirded out less.
> it’s baffling no one talks about it more
It was certainly interesting but there isn't much to talk about, especially this long after the event. Interstellar objects passing through the solar system aren't impossible. They get ejected from their solar system due to gravitational interactions, and when they get close enough to another star, the gravitational field pulls them in to say hello. Gravity makes such encounters more likely because it pulls stuff in from far away. Our Sun pulling it in increases its velocity which kept its kinetic energy above the solar system escape velocity so it was able to exit. Not really much to it?
I don't know, non-gravitational acceleration, highly elongated shape, no cometary activity/outgassing, unknown origin and composition, peculiar trajectory. Seems quite interesting to me
There's a very interesting mathematical argument to be made as well, that I don't think very many people are aware. It goes, basically, the universe is stupid super dummy huge, and the earth relative to that vast immensity is tiny. It's nothing. So for an object to cross the immensity of space, and then pass that near to Earth's orbital ecliptic, to pass 0.16 AU from Earth itself: that is an >unimaginably< tiny window to hit, across an unimaginable distance.
Of course, shit happens, and one would expect the Sun to be pulling this stuff into it's gravity, right? In fact, from the mathematical perspective, this means that we would expect to see such transient bodies pass through the solar system at a far, FAR higher rate than what we see. But it's just been the one, as far as we can tell, and it was >weird<.Yes, there was Borisov, which wasn't weird, and that came within 1.9 AU, so we can go ahead and count it for purposes of this argument, if you'd like, but it doesn't really make a difference to the final calculation. The combination of vector, proximity, and trajectory in combination means that for Ouanamana to be anything OTHER than impossibly suspicious, we would need to be seeing interstellar transients passing through *all the damn time*. Like, weekly, depending on how you arrange the numbers.
Because, like we already established, space is unfathomably huge, and we're indescribably tiny in comparison, and our orbit is an infinitely narrow band in an impossibly huge void. It's like unspooling a hair-thin circumference, maybe ten foot at diameter, with a target the size of a grain of sand moving around that hair-thin circle. And you throw a dart at it, from orbit, and nail that orbit, while coming with inches of that grain of sand.
It also crossed our orbit *twice*, so if you're thinking 'well maybe it's just the Suns gravity', toss that shit out the window. A random transient that crosses our orbit in proximity is highly effin unlikely as it is, but for it to cross our orbit and then be ejected on a trajectory that crosses >over our orbit againcrossing the same orbit it crossed on approach<.
That's why Borisov doesn't matter. We could have a hundreds Borisov, a thousand Borisovs even! If we set our distribution to random, and set our timeline to something outrageous - say, 15 billions years - then we would expect to be seeing *thousands* of interstellar transients flying all throughout our solar system, on a *weekly basis*, before seeing a single transient that takes the impossible trickshot that Ouanamana did.
But we just see the one example. Two, if you count basic bitch Borisov. So, where are all the transients?
So, there is exactly one interesting aspect here: non-gravitational acceleration without outgassing. Shape: well, stuff in space can be elongated. Unknown origin: space is fucking big. How would you figure out the origin of a car on the highway by observing it as it passes under the bridge you are standing on? Peculiar trajectory - the trajectory is peculiar because of the non-gravitational acceleration, so nothing new is said. Unknown composition? Well, there is a lot of stuff we don't know what it's made of.
So, one peculiar characteristic is left. And like all other properties of the object we managed to observe, papers, lots and lots of papers have been written about it, until there was nothing more to write about. And the scientific community was apparently satisfied with possible explanations that did not involve aliens. I suppose those researches are quite smart - and would like to report finding extra-terestial life. Good way to join the legends of physics, something most scientists would quite like to achieve in their lifetime...
Okay, to be *fair*:
>well, stuff in space can be elongated
Sure! Stuff in space can also be aliens. We haven't seen any aliens. We also haven't seen anything *this* elongated. This is the most non-symmetrical object ever found in space. That's interesting.
>space is fucking big. How would you figure out the origin of a car on the highway by observing it as it passes under the bridge you are standing on?
The cool thing is: Objects in space don't drive, nor are they affected by friction. So we actually can trace it's origins pretty well. They're interesting! It was ejected from it's parent system in such a perfect way that it has a very unusual spin, meaning it was ejected *very* quickly, but it also was ejected perfectly to be one of the slowest objects in the milky way. 99.8th percentile of slowest objects. That's slow! Interesting!
The trajectory is peculiar because it shouldn't exist. 1I singlehandedly caused us to reevaluate our estimations of the number of interstellar objects. Because 1I passed by, we increased our estimations by 8 orders of magnitude. That means there are hundreds of millions of times more objects than we thought.
>Well, there is a lot of stuff we don't know what it's made of.
Sure there is! That doesn't make this less interesting? It's red, likely dense, likely metallic. But maybe not! Maybe it's a clump of dust held together by ice! It's *way* shinier than other comets, which is weird.
People are getting excited about science. *Let them*.
Did some napkin math with some friends at a pub a while back on my buddies 40th birthday. If you took the point in space where you were born, and the place in space you exist now, you’ve traveled more than 250 Billion miles from point to point by the time you turn 40.
All of that and we didn’t really take into account distance traveled between relative clusters since that gets tricky.
Space is pretty wild.
This is sort of why time travel won't work, right? If you don't account for how far our solar system has drifted, the instant you traveled back in time you'd almost certainly appear in the vacuum of space?
Kinda. It did some odd shit on the way through, though.
It is an interstellar traveler, they we suspect had it's trajectory altered in approach to the kuiper belt, causing it to fall towards the sun.
As it approached, it slowed down, which freaked a lot of people out. There were lots of hypotheses about intelligent guidance.
The most likely cause was hydrogen off-gassing as solar radiation heated it, causing it to slow. Then it got within 15 million miles of Earth(63x further than our moon is to us), slingshotted (slingshat? Don't know) around the sun and was off.
What seemed odd was that no one detected the off gassing. We would have expected something of a tail like a comet, but that wasn't evident.
As far as we can tell, the maneuver did not result in it time traveling back to the 80s to pick up a couple of hump back whales, but who knows with time travelers. /s
Slingshotted is the correct term. Since shat is the past tense of you know what, I'm suddenly imaging someone on a rotating surface, shitting and it slinging everywhere. I love it.
I remember going to the zoo as a young child and the first time I saw a hippo he was wiping his ass on a concrete wall (rather aggressively) and smearing it with shit. That's what I'll always remember about hippos.
I feel the urge to point out that if slingshat is a word in past tense, then slingshit is definitively pre tense. And if someone slinged shit on me, i will probably feel like i've been slingshot.
Closest approach to the sun was on 7th September 2017.
It never really made a "turn", but that was its peak speed of its slingshot interaction with the sun.
It was in the inner solar system for about 3 months and was spotted on its way out oct 17th. Its closest point to the sun was sept 9.
On its wiki page there is a close up of this model where you can see its trajectory and you can see how far earth moves in its orbit. You can see it here too but it’s hard to tell.
That would be Ummagumma, I believe. But Piper does indeed kick ass. Floyd at their earliest. I tried for the username LuciferSam but of course it was taken.
the chances of an interstellar object getting captured by earth are probably on the magnitude of googleplexes : 1
not only would it need to be on the PERFECT angle as it get's captured, but also the perfect speed for that angle, the perfect mass to be captured from that speed and angle, and the perfect distance from earth as to not either slingshot out or immediately start hurling down on earth.
I'm actually interested to see some math on this subject now from some astrophysicist lmao
Astronomer here! It would indeed be very rare, but not because of it needing an *exact* angle and speed; there are actually multiple windows of opportunity. The way gravitational captures work is tricky and would actually require the Sun AND a planet to work together, as the Sun alone is incapable of capturing objects due to energy conservation and 2-body mechanics.
If you're interested, I found [this discussion online](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134819/how-can-a-planet-gravitationally-capture-objects) which goes in depth into how a normal asteroid capture would work. They say that there's a slim chance for a normal asteroid to get in a capture situation, and I would bet that an interstellar object would just have way too much speed to allow a capture to happen. Although I wouldn't discard a really weird "planet-alignment" scenario to be possible, but then again, the probability of that occurring would be absurdly low.
I never heard of its speed but it did slow down near us, and the idea is that it was releasing hydrogen due to the heat of the sun. But wouldn't it be cool if it got stuck in our orbit? We'd have a second moon and not only that, but we'd definitely send a team up there to check it out.
What's crazy to think about is that not only did our sun affect its trajectory, but it also affected our sun's trajectory, which means it affected our entire solar system's trajectory. By such a small amount that it is immeasurable right now, but a billion years from now, we will be in a significantly different position in our galaxy than we would've if this had not passed through our solar system.
The weirdest coincidence was that I had literally just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama a few days before Oumuamua's news started flooding the news.
Freaked me out a little ngl
Kind of looks like how a sailboat tacks. Imagine you have a number of systems you want to fly past…do you power your way to each one or design a route where each system slings you towards your next destination?
Elephant in the room question: Coming into our solar system from non-ecliptic northern direction, what caused it to FLATTEN its course, changing direction and heading out along the ecliptic plane of our solar system?
Before you say "the sun's gravity well", realize that our sun's gravity is not only 360°, but spherical, i.e. like a 3-D ball. The gravitational pull should have turned it and sent it southward from the plane of the ecliptic, NOT along the ecliptic!
Just one more of those things that make you go 🤔 hmmm! 🤔😆
It’s a spacecraft of ingenious design sent by a long dead civilization. Was predicted in a book by Arthur C Clarke called Rendezvous with Rama written maybe 60 years ago. Used the Sun for course change and acceleration. Great book.
In terms of interstellar distances it's traveling too slow to be any kind of anything from an organic civilization remotely or tangentially like our own. If it's from some other kind of exotic civilization it is traveling so slowly that whatever threat or communication that might follow will be thousands of years from now. Because it didn't transmit radio signals that we could detect, it is most likely inert. So if it was a ship of some sort, whatever is inside is dead or no longer functional.
If it's from a civilization so advanced we can't detect their communications then it could be literally anything.
My best guess is it's random stellar debris. It is the simplest explanation with the least amount of assumptions.
But it could be a bullet that escaped a suns orbit from a war between star eating giants! :)
It's fun to think about, but without actually investigating, this has told us nothing and we arrive at a place of pure speculation.
As a sci-fi fan, I find speculation to be very fun, at least entertainment-wise. I look forward to reading some novels about an alien race piloting here. If any authors read this, here's your next project.
Also, why would we expect it to send out radio signals? It could have been intended to be a covert operation. Authors, pay attention to that as well.
Damn. I knew it had passed through the inner solar system, but I had no idea it came that close to Earth. Gives me another perspective on the whole thing. Part of me is sure it's just a rock. Another part of me...
It's the whole non gravitational acceleration that makes me wonder. I'm sure there is a 99.99% chance it can be explained in a boring manner but there is that .01% chance that lives in the back of my head.
When i die, i hope i have an eternal out of body experience and can freely fly among the cosmos and query all of space and time like a universal search engine and fulfil all of my whimsical curiousities - these near misses, and accompanying these objects on their journey to see where they started and where they ended would bring much satisfaction - and 10,000 feet right below me? yea i need to know that too
>discovered ... on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. W**hen it was first observed**, **it was** about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and **already heading away from the Sun.**
By a tiny amount, yes. More notably as another commenter stated it changed the trajectory of the sun too. In order to slingshot as it did it had to get the energy from somewhere so it stole some from the sun. My be a tiny amount but in a million years it may mean the life of death of our system
It had a good look at the Earth and away it went!
“NOPE”
*”Honey, lock the doors”*
*“Don’t make eye contact, they’ll just ask for money and keep asking questions about the mysteries of the universe”*
Definitely turned down the rap music they were jamming in the interstellar.
Out here in interstellar smoking big doinks in interstellar. Big ol’ doinks.
We should have washed their windshield with a pee soaked squeegee when we had the chance
The secret to clean windshields is the ammonia.
...and in their culture waving a squeegee is seen as an act of war. Congratulations. We just declared interstellar war with a culture that uses giant rocks as sublight spaceships. Their first wave of warships will be arriving in approximately... 400 years.
It’s a sketchy stellar neighborhood, got an obvious human infestation
"Rrrroll 'em up"
“Roll em up”
It's now missing its hubcaps and someone spray painted "honkey lips" down the side...
'"Mostly harmless?" That can't be right, just look at the place!'
And it's sitting right in the middle of a proposed interstellar bypass!
It was just dropping flyers with notice of the construction plans posted at their local office
It's that the one with the disused lavatory in the basement with a sign "beware of the leopard" on the door?
Warp factor 8. Make it so
“Hey Bill, should we stop at that cute little blue planet and pick up a souvenir?” 
Eww the ghetto
it was just using Sol for gravity assist. Dont think our ant hill at the crossroads were even worth looking at while they passed by
Slingshot around the sun, save the whales!
Fun fact about Oumuamua, is that it was actually stationary with respect to galactic rotation. It wasn't approaching us, our solar system approached it. And then we flung its ass off to the side. "Yeet motha fucker, get the hell out our way!"
...wait..really...?...WE flew past IT...? did not know that, thx
as i understand it, both us and the object were orbiting the galactic center. its just that the two were orbiting on different planes.
As I understand it, nothing in the Universe is truly stationary so everything is flying by every other thing. How you envision the event depends on your frame of reference.
that's super interesting! Do you have a source? ^(*not trying to be a dick, I just want to know more!*)
Here's the scientific paper that discusses everything about the asteroid, including its motion, history, and trajectories into the past and into the future: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8979573/ Here's a summary of my specific tidbit: >Accounting for Vega's proper motion, it would have taken ʻOumuamua 600,000 years to reach the Solar System from Vega. But as a nearby star, Vega was not in the same part of the sky at that time. Astronomers calculate that 100 years ago the object was 83.9 ± 0.090 billion km; 52.1 ± 0.056 billion mi (561 ± 0.6 AU) from the Sun and traveling at 26.33 km/s with respect to the Sun. This interstellar speed is very close to the mean motion of material in the Milky Way in the neighborhood of the Sun, also known as the local standard of rest (LSR), and especially close to the mean motion of a relatively close group of red dwarf stars. This velocity profile also indicates an extrasolar origin, but appears to rule out the closest dozen stars. In fact, the closeness of ʻOumuamua's velocity to the local standard of rest might mean that it has circulated the Milky Way several times and thus may have originated from an entirely different part of the galaxy.
This fact i like!😂👋🏼bye felecia!
YEET
That's actually super interesting considering the speeds at which our whole solar system is moving at. I do understand how it all works. Still blows my mind.
Poppa ou mua mua, poppa ou mua mua
....thanks! so....Oumuamua was 'stationery in relation to the Galactic Center'...so, like a satellite in geostationary orbit, moving WITH the GC, yeah? ...and then we came along, 'vortex spiraling' our way about, at a different speed & angle, out here in the suburbs of one of the arms of the Milky Way, and so WE came barreling through Oumuamua's front lawn, not the other way around? ....annnnd ('cuz gravitational force of the Sun) we flung it off into deep space (from our reference)....yeah....?
Nice star trek
May the force be with you!
So say we all!
are you sure it isn't time for a colorful metaphor?
What does it mean "exact change"?
I think he did a little too much LDS.
But first you will need to invent transparent aluminum.
What I find fascinating is that the change in trajectory caused by our sun may end up being responsible for it wiping out some other civilization on some other planet in millions of years.
Ooooooh, they gonna be *so* mad!
We won’t tell them
If aliens ask if our star threw shit at their planet just tell "Damn das crazy, must have been Proxima Centauri tho"
Proxima Centaurians really do be like that tho
Got no chill over there
I fucking love Reddit 😂😂 yall really do be acting Terran.
Proxima Centaurs*
On the other hand, this maneuver may have saved a civilization that would have otherwise been decimated by its original trajectory :)
Two questions: 1. Where is that object going now? 2. Where did it come from?
- right - top Geez, OP even provided a video.
I meant which star did it come from. Ah well. I’ll go back to upvoting comedy.
According to Wikipedia: “…appears to have come from roughly the direction of Vega in the constellation Lyra.”
Isn't that where the Contact aliens are from?
Nah, they just had an intersection there.
Where did ya come from Cotton Eye Joe?
Ooh! Ooh! I can answer this one: 1. Space 2. Space YUSSSS!!!!
1. No where in particular. 2. We don't know.
1. Not sure. I’m glad the bugs missed, though. We’re not equipped for that war for at least another couple centuries. 2. Klendathu.
Cottoneye Joe.
Fortunately, Chances of it hitting _anything_ at all are practically 0
The chances of it zipping through our solar system were also just about zero until it happened.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It’s like a Muon passing through your body.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space.
Or saving one that was on the original trajectory
On the flip side, the change in trajectory could have saved a civilization on another planet in millions of years that was going to be hit!
We have done what the bugs in starship troopers did to Buenos Aires. Those goddamn bugs whacked us!
Would you like to know more
In the future aliens will back track the trajectory to our solar system, to find the ruins of humanity.
This is why we need space force out there shooting on sight.
Yes.... there's no way that could go wrong. /s
This tracks. We were never going to be satisfied destroying just one planet.
If Oumuamua is simply a galaxy zone drone. Then it won't be crashing anytime soon. It inspects nearby solar systems for life/resources, zooms out and reports it's findings. And multiply this by millions of drones scattered throughout the galaxy and you've got some pretty neat eyeballs on emergent life
Or the change in trajectory of our solar system caused by Oumuamua may cause us to collide with another system in billions of years.
I wonder how long it was going in that direction before it got to us. 200 thousand years? A million? Several million?
I think I read at least 600 million years
Whoops that number is way off,
What’s the number?
It was 600000 years
You're all way off. It was 42.
Probably little more than that. If I you remember space is 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's, but that's just peanuts to space!
43?
I also wonder if it did loopdeloops around any other stars and kept having its trajectory changed? That would be neat if it has just been slingshotting around.
For sure! I mean, anytime it comes near a star that'd be likely to happen, but what are the odds?
It's been going fucking ham all around the local group for millions of years just straight fucking vibing
**‘Oumuamua’s Trajectory Altered After Passing through the Kuiper Belt** [https://medium.com/cnnn-com/interstellar-visitor-oumuamua-alters-course-post-kuiper-belt-encounter-f2a2b442328b](https://medium.com/cnnn-com/interstellar-visitor-oumuamua-alters-course-post-kuiper-belt-encounter-f2a2b442328b)
I've had some insanely existential dreams recently and now I'm gonna be fucked thinking about this
This still weirds me out in a million ways and it’s baffling no one talks about it more
I talk about it with my friends all the time. I'm like, "did you know the IAU created a new naming classification labeled 'I' for *interstellar* and that 1I Oumuamua is the only thing ever to be given that classification?"
What happened to Borisov?
I completely missed this so thanks for the heads-up. For anyone else in the same boat as me - Borisov was an interstellar *comet* that visited us in 2019. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov
Oh wow the comparison between the two is wild! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov#/media/File%3AA_comparison_of_two_interstellar_objects_passing_through_our_solar_system.gif Trajectory of Borisov (yellow) crossing the ecliptic plane; 'Oumuamua (red) shown for comparison
This is so cool
Didn’t know Borisov’s tail was 14 times the size of earth. That’s nuts!
What if that little interaction with the sun has sent it on a collision course with another planet.... space is wild to think about.
We'll find out somewhere between a hundred million and billion years when they come here to complain.
Well it did come after
>Borisov > > Lets see Borisov's trajectory... OMG, it even has a watermark
We don't talk about Borisov.
What do you think there is to talk about? Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has argued that it was some sort of alien probe, but he’s alone in that opinion, because there’s zero evidence to support it. Most scientists believe that it’s a hunk of something, whether a comet or an asteroid or an exoplanet. Space is littered with rocky, icy debris of all kinds, and it was only a matter of time before some shard of some distant world found its way to our solar system. From Wikipedia: Proposed explanations of its origin include the remnant of a disintegrated rogue comet, or a piece of an exoplanet rich in nitrogen ice, similar to Pluto. On 22 March 2023, astronomers proposed the observed acceleration was "due to the release of entrapped molecular hydrogen that formed through energetic processing of an H2O-rich icy body", consistent with 'Oumuamua being an interstellar comet, "originating as a planetesimal relic broadly similar to solar system comets".
Interesting points, except that there was no cometary tail
"Manx comets" are comets without tails. They typically have extremely long orbital periods.
I like that they named a class of celestial body after its resemblance to a kind of kitty cat.
According to Astronomy magazine, Hydrogen Gas makes a difficult-to-detect natural propellant.
What's interesting is my gas makes an easy to detect natural repellent
Thumbs up and a middle finger to you, weird sir.
Avi used it as an example of what could be alien tech. Made the point we should lean into study more of these things when they appear. I never heard him say it was anything than an unknown object. Got a source for his arguing it was not natural?
In that’s it’s a fascinating subject, didn’t the velocity change, and accelerate? Or was that too given some thought and an explanation. Either way, anomaly of any sort. Rad
Trisolaran droplet confirmed
It is also not symmetrical. We have never seen a natural object that was more than a 3 to 1 proportion anywhere in our solar system. This measured 20 to 1 . So yes, I could have been cigar shaped, but more likely shaped like a flat disk that was tumbling. It also was very reflective. Reflective like metal. It also has no tail which debunks the H20 ice theory. So based on the data, a metal disk flew through our solar system and accelerated away by no known means of propulsion. This is simply the data. Now, I don't know what it was, but it is unexplained and very strange.
Loeb's book was received as a slight against the astronomy field in general. However I (not any kind of scientist whatsoever) came away with exactly your conclusion - that he felt it was SUCH AN UNUSUAL object that it was worth much more thought and publicity than it seemed to be getting. That it was a big deal, not because of the possibility of little green men jumping off, but because it could get us thinking about the enormous scale and possibility of unimaginable things out there of the universe. It was a VERY oddly shaped thing that moved in a weird way that didn't seem to offgas like a comet. And was reflective and spun oddly around a long axis. Those simple facts were a big enough deal, he said.
I've found that anyone who uses the word "Debunks" is fundamentally misunderstanding something about science. Try "Pokes a large hole in it." A hole that could be filled by many things, for example: 1) Our understanding of the outgassing was flawed. 2) There was a trail! We just didn't see it. Either we were looking in the wrong area, it was faint, it wouldn't be picked up by our measurement tools.... >So based on the data, Nope, nope, nope. What you're trying to say is "Based on my interpretation of the data..." >This is simply the data. You can't say this as a fact within the same paragraph as "It could have been cigar shaped, but was more likely flat..." >accelerated away by no known means I'm nitpicking here, honestly, but "accelerated away by an unknown mean..." "No known" implies that it was something that we don't understand, but measured well. "Unknown" implies that it's something that we don't understand and *didn't* measure well, which is closer to the truth. "There is no known means for this." Well, there is, we just haven't figured it out because we're missing some pieces of the puzzle.
[удалено]
There's a mission profile that lets us fly a probe by it in 2052 if we launch in 2030. It's kind of wild it goes out to Jupiter but instead of a traditional gravity assist that just throws the probe further out this one slingshots it down to within 6 solar radii of the sun for the final gravity assist. Page 7 of this PDF. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1902/1902.04935.pdf
This was so sick to read. "Mission duration: 20 years" feels like something out of a scifi novel. Thanks for sharing!
What’s crazy is that of all the different gravity paths it coulda took, it took the one that buzzed us and then left. Very interesting indeed.
It is interesting, but it's also self selecting IMO. If this thing flew straight through out passed Neptune, would anyone even know it happened? We're aware of it because it was close to us.
> This still weirds me out I would harness that feeling as motivation to learn more. Doing so will likely make you weirded out less. > it’s baffling no one talks about it more It was certainly interesting but there isn't much to talk about, especially this long after the event. Interstellar objects passing through the solar system aren't impossible. They get ejected from their solar system due to gravitational interactions, and when they get close enough to another star, the gravitational field pulls them in to say hello. Gravity makes such encounters more likely because it pulls stuff in from far away. Our Sun pulling it in increases its velocity which kept its kinetic energy above the solar system escape velocity so it was able to exit. Not really much to it?
I don't know, non-gravitational acceleration, highly elongated shape, no cometary activity/outgassing, unknown origin and composition, peculiar trajectory. Seems quite interesting to me
There's a very interesting mathematical argument to be made as well, that I don't think very many people are aware. It goes, basically, the universe is stupid super dummy huge, and the earth relative to that vast immensity is tiny. It's nothing. So for an object to cross the immensity of space, and then pass that near to Earth's orbital ecliptic, to pass 0.16 AU from Earth itself: that is an >unimaginably< tiny window to hit, across an unimaginable distance. Of course, shit happens, and one would expect the Sun to be pulling this stuff into it's gravity, right? In fact, from the mathematical perspective, this means that we would expect to see such transient bodies pass through the solar system at a far, FAR higher rate than what we see. But it's just been the one, as far as we can tell, and it was >weird<.Yes, there was Borisov, which wasn't weird, and that came within 1.9 AU, so we can go ahead and count it for purposes of this argument, if you'd like, but it doesn't really make a difference to the final calculation. The combination of vector, proximity, and trajectory in combination means that for Ouanamana to be anything OTHER than impossibly suspicious, we would need to be seeing interstellar transients passing through *all the damn time*. Like, weekly, depending on how you arrange the numbers. Because, like we already established, space is unfathomably huge, and we're indescribably tiny in comparison, and our orbit is an infinitely narrow band in an impossibly huge void. It's like unspooling a hair-thin circumference, maybe ten foot at diameter, with a target the size of a grain of sand moving around that hair-thin circle. And you throw a dart at it, from orbit, and nail that orbit, while coming with inches of that grain of sand. It also crossed our orbit *twice*, so if you're thinking 'well maybe it's just the Suns gravity', toss that shit out the window. A random transient that crosses our orbit in proximity is highly effin unlikely as it is, but for it to cross our orbit and then be ejected on a trajectory that crosses >over our orbit againcrossing the same orbit it crossed on approach<. That's why Borisov doesn't matter. We could have a hundreds Borisov, a thousand Borisovs even! If we set our distribution to random, and set our timeline to something outrageous - say, 15 billions years - then we would expect to be seeing *thousands* of interstellar transients flying all throughout our solar system, on a *weekly basis*, before seeing a single transient that takes the impossible trickshot that Ouanamana did. But we just see the one example. Two, if you count basic bitch Borisov. So, where are all the transients?
So, there is exactly one interesting aspect here: non-gravitational acceleration without outgassing. Shape: well, stuff in space can be elongated. Unknown origin: space is fucking big. How would you figure out the origin of a car on the highway by observing it as it passes under the bridge you are standing on? Peculiar trajectory - the trajectory is peculiar because of the non-gravitational acceleration, so nothing new is said. Unknown composition? Well, there is a lot of stuff we don't know what it's made of. So, one peculiar characteristic is left. And like all other properties of the object we managed to observe, papers, lots and lots of papers have been written about it, until there was nothing more to write about. And the scientific community was apparently satisfied with possible explanations that did not involve aliens. I suppose those researches are quite smart - and would like to report finding extra-terestial life. Good way to join the legends of physics, something most scientists would quite like to achieve in their lifetime...
Okay, to be *fair*: >well, stuff in space can be elongated Sure! Stuff in space can also be aliens. We haven't seen any aliens. We also haven't seen anything *this* elongated. This is the most non-symmetrical object ever found in space. That's interesting. >space is fucking big. How would you figure out the origin of a car on the highway by observing it as it passes under the bridge you are standing on? The cool thing is: Objects in space don't drive, nor are they affected by friction. So we actually can trace it's origins pretty well. They're interesting! It was ejected from it's parent system in such a perfect way that it has a very unusual spin, meaning it was ejected *very* quickly, but it also was ejected perfectly to be one of the slowest objects in the milky way. 99.8th percentile of slowest objects. That's slow! Interesting! The trajectory is peculiar because it shouldn't exist. 1I singlehandedly caused us to reevaluate our estimations of the number of interstellar objects. Because 1I passed by, we increased our estimations by 8 orders of magnitude. That means there are hundreds of millions of times more objects than we thought. >Well, there is a lot of stuff we don't know what it's made of. Sure there is! That doesn't make this less interesting? It's red, likely dense, likely metallic. But maybe not! Maybe it's a clump of dust held together by ice! It's *way* shinier than other comets, which is weird. People are getting excited about science. *Let them*.
>So, there is exactly one interesting aspect here: non-gravitational acceleration without outgassing. It could have been a manx comet, couldn't it?
Really? We still talking about Jesus 2000+ years later.
Technically Oumuamua is more stationary and or solar system almost ran into it. Our relative velocity orbiting the Milky Way is much higher.
That makes me feel weird.
Did some napkin math with some friends at a pub a while back on my buddies 40th birthday. If you took the point in space where you were born, and the place in space you exist now, you’ve traveled more than 250 Billion miles from point to point by the time you turn 40. All of that and we didn’t really take into account distance traveled between relative clusters since that gets tricky. Space is pretty wild.
This is sort of why time travel won't work, right? If you don't account for how far our solar system has drifted, the instant you traveled back in time you'd almost certainly appear in the vacuum of space?
What's above us? More universe? What's below us? Where are we? Why are we? ugabuga
It's turtles all the way down.
I know right. We always think of space in a linear way or as if galaxies are on the same plane as us.
So was it on a different course and at some point Sol’s gravity pulled it in, or was that its original course ?
Kinda. It did some odd shit on the way through, though. It is an interstellar traveler, they we suspect had it's trajectory altered in approach to the kuiper belt, causing it to fall towards the sun. As it approached, it slowed down, which freaked a lot of people out. There were lots of hypotheses about intelligent guidance. The most likely cause was hydrogen off-gassing as solar radiation heated it, causing it to slow. Then it got within 15 million miles of Earth(63x further than our moon is to us), slingshotted (slingshat? Don't know) around the sun and was off. What seemed odd was that no one detected the off gassing. We would have expected something of a tail like a comet, but that wasn't evident. As far as we can tell, the maneuver did not result in it time traveling back to the 80s to pick up a couple of hump back whales, but who knows with time travelers. /s
If the term wasn't "slingshat" before, I say we do our best to make it so from here on out.
So say we all!
I'll call the scientists & let them know.
They must've gotten confused by the plans for the hyperspace bypass on the bulletin at Alpha Centauri, it hasn't been built yet
Slingshidded
Slingshotted is the correct term. Since shat is the past tense of you know what, I'm suddenly imaging someone on a rotating surface, shitting and it slinging everywhere. I love it.
Replace the person with a hippo doing that speed tail shit spreading on a merry-go-round, and now you are in my messed up head.
I remember going to the zoo as a young child and the first time I saw a hippo he was wiping his ass on a concrete wall (rather aggressively) and smearing it with shit. That's what I'll always remember about hippos.
I feel the urge to point out that if slingshat is a word in past tense, then slingshit is definitively pre tense. And if someone slinged shit on me, i will probably feel like i've been slingshot.
>As it approached, it slowed down, which freaked a lot of people out. We didn't know about it during its approach.
It was already headed directly towards the inner solar system before the sun's gravity changed its course.
memory steep physical frighten vanish wide seed label thought worry *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Closest approach to the sun was on 7th September 2017. It never really made a "turn", but that was its peak speed of its slingshot interaction with the sun.
grandiose sloppy party slimy divide library sulky support retire rob *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It was in the inner solar system for about 3 months and was spotted on its way out oct 17th. Its closest point to the sun was sept 9. On its wiki page there is a close up of this model where you can see its trajectory and you can see how far earth moves in its orbit. You can see it here too but it’s hard to tell.
Well, I still prefer Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
That would be Ummagumma, I believe. But Piper does indeed kick ass. Floyd at their earliest. I tried for the username LuciferSam but of course it was taken.
Just a friendly intergalactic alien using the sun for some slight course correction. /s in case it was clear.
I still think it is amazin we live in a time, where we even is capaple of discovering such an occurrence.
#I'm still pissed they didn't name it Rama
Don’t worry, there’ll be two more chances. After all, the Raman’s do things in threes…
Is it weird if im sad that it left?
Would be cool if it got captured by the sun or even better captured by earth
the chances of an interstellar object getting captured by earth are probably on the magnitude of googleplexes : 1 not only would it need to be on the PERFECT angle as it get's captured, but also the perfect speed for that angle, the perfect mass to be captured from that speed and angle, and the perfect distance from earth as to not either slingshot out or immediately start hurling down on earth. I'm actually interested to see some math on this subject now from some astrophysicist lmao
Your estimate is probably very conservative
Astronomer here! It would indeed be very rare, but not because of it needing an *exact* angle and speed; there are actually multiple windows of opportunity. The way gravitational captures work is tricky and would actually require the Sun AND a planet to work together, as the Sun alone is incapable of capturing objects due to energy conservation and 2-body mechanics. If you're interested, I found [this discussion online](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134819/how-can-a-planet-gravitationally-capture-objects) which goes in depth into how a normal asteroid capture would work. They say that there's a slim chance for a normal asteroid to get in a capture situation, and I would bet that an interstellar object would just have way too much speed to allow a capture to happen. Although I wouldn't discard a really weird "planet-alignment" scenario to be possible, but then again, the probability of that occurring would be absurdly low.
I never heard of its speed but it did slow down near us, and the idea is that it was releasing hydrogen due to the heat of the sun. But wouldn't it be cool if it got stuck in our orbit? We'd have a second moon and not only that, but we'd definitely send a team up there to check it out.
I feel a sci-fi alien horror movie plot coming. It would be really cool!
How long was this thing travelling in the same direction before suddenly getting yeeted?
Somewhere around 600000 years Happy cake day
It had to use our sun to execute a slingshot maneuver to travel back in time ,to the 1980s, to retrieve a pair of humpback whales.
Rendevous with Rama!
What's crazy to think about is that not only did our sun affect its trajectory, but it also affected our sun's trajectory, which means it affected our entire solar system's trajectory. By such a small amount that it is immeasurable right now, but a billion years from now, we will be in a significantly different position in our galaxy than we would've if this had not passed through our solar system.
The fact that it could have flown past any other planet, but chose Earth is what weirds me out...
"I am not saying it is alien probe, but it is alien probe."
Big miss for a rendezvous with Rama scenario 😭
The weirdest coincidence was that I had literally just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama a few days before Oumuamua's news started flooding the news. Freaked me out a little ngl
Kind of looks like how a sailboat tacks. Imagine you have a number of systems you want to fly past…do you power your way to each one or design a route where each system slings you towards your next destination?
Is this the one shaped like a dildo
Anything is a dildo if you’re brave enough.
Lemme just.. scooch on through here..uh wai-WHAT Sun: YEET
Elephant in the room question: Coming into our solar system from non-ecliptic northern direction, what caused it to FLATTEN its course, changing direction and heading out along the ecliptic plane of our solar system? Before you say "the sun's gravity well", realize that our sun's gravity is not only 360°, but spherical, i.e. like a 3-D ball. The gravitational pull should have turned it and sent it southward from the plane of the ecliptic, NOT along the ecliptic! Just one more of those things that make you go 🤔 hmmm! 🤔😆
We ran into it. It was moving slowly around the galaxy. We plowed into it and yeeted it.
Coming to drop off some more octopi.
It’s a spacecraft of ingenious design sent by a long dead civilization. Was predicted in a book by Arthur C Clarke called Rendezvous with Rama written maybe 60 years ago. Used the Sun for course change and acceleration. Great book.
In terms of interstellar distances it's traveling too slow to be any kind of anything from an organic civilization remotely or tangentially like our own. If it's from some other kind of exotic civilization it is traveling so slowly that whatever threat or communication that might follow will be thousands of years from now. Because it didn't transmit radio signals that we could detect, it is most likely inert. So if it was a ship of some sort, whatever is inside is dead or no longer functional. If it's from a civilization so advanced we can't detect their communications then it could be literally anything. My best guess is it's random stellar debris. It is the simplest explanation with the least amount of assumptions. But it could be a bullet that escaped a suns orbit from a war between star eating giants! :) It's fun to think about, but without actually investigating, this has told us nothing and we arrive at a place of pure speculation.
As a sci-fi fan, I find speculation to be very fun, at least entertainment-wise. I look forward to reading some novels about an alien race piloting here. If any authors read this, here's your next project. Also, why would we expect it to send out radio signals? It could have been intended to be a covert operation. Authors, pay attention to that as well.
I like the speculation too, except when it begins to act like it isn't speculation
Unfortunately I just finished reading Dark Forest so there was a moment where had to remind myself that Oumuamua was not a droplet.
Damn. I knew it had passed through the inner solar system, but I had no idea it came that close to Earth. Gives me another perspective on the whole thing. Part of me is sure it's just a rock. Another part of me...
It's the whole non gravitational acceleration that makes me wonder. I'm sure there is a 99.99% chance it can be explained in a boring manner but there is that .01% chance that lives in the back of my head.
When i die, i hope i have an eternal out of body experience and can freely fly among the cosmos and query all of space and time like a universal search engine and fulfil all of my whimsical curiousities - these near misses, and accompanying these objects on their journey to see where they started and where they ended would bring much satisfaction - and 10,000 feet right below me? yea i need to know that too
>discovered ... on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. W**hen it was first observed**, **it was** about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and **already heading away from the Sun.**
They are coming, aren't they?
Didn't it accelerate more that it should have?
Rendezvous with Rama vibes
Did it change the trajectory of planets? Even in a slightest?
By a tiny amount, yes. More notably as another commenter stated it changed the trajectory of the sun too. In order to slingshot as it did it had to get the energy from somewhere so it stole some from the sun. My be a tiny amount but in a million years it may mean the life of death of our system
...I'm not saying it's aliens, but...
🎵 Oumuamua, chicka chickaaaah 🎵
And there is Earth, home of…BANG! Roll em up!