It might be just a rubble pile, barely being held together.
Oumuamua - The Next Great Project
- Thread starter Dryson
- Start date
But finding out where it came from might help us to understand it's home solar system.
Without more information, it could be just about anything.
If it was accelerating, what was acting on that rubble in a way it held together.
The closest approach to the Earth was 24,180,000 km and the object was estimated to be no longer than 1 km so the angle subtended at the Earth was no greater than 0.008 arc seconds. That's like trying to resolve the details of a 15 metre wide object on the Moon from the Earth. The HST's 2.4 m mirror can just manage to resolve 0.05 arc seconds at visible wavelengths. Larger ground-based telescope should theoretically be able to resolve down to 0.02 arc seconds as resolution is inversely proportional to aperture but even with adaptive optics, the best they can achieve is about 0.1 arc seconds. So even with the HST, all they would be able to get is a smudge.
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Heh...
Here is what I am thinking.
Were the Earth to be hit by something REALLY big...a good bit of Half-Dome might come up in one piece. Sedimentary rock crumbles.
Now, out West, you sometimes see rock “explode” from heat, release of stress—what have you.
Enough, say, to give a little boost to something that flew by, even after it had long passed the solar heat source.
My verdict?
It is a huge shard of granite.
Avi's take
https://futurism.com/avi-loeb-and-the-great-unknown
Here is what I am thinking.
Were the Earth to be hit by something REALLY big...a good bit of Half-Dome might come up in one piece. Sedimentary rock crumbles.
Now, out West, you sometimes see rock “explode” from heat, release of stress—what have you.
Enough, say, to give a little boost to something that flew by, even after it had long passed the solar heat source.
My verdict?
It is a huge shard of granite.
Avi's take
https://futurism.com/avi-loeb-and-the-great-unknown
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This is a nice Star Talk Cosmic Queries edition by Neil Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice and cosmochemist Natalie Starkey that clears up what is actually known and what is speculative and what the chances of those speculation being useful enough to be true are. Very grounded.
Do the spectral observations support that hypothesis? I thought the observations indicated carbonaceous chondritic-type surface but I might be recalling incorrectly. Also felsic rocks such as granite are usually formed on Earth at subduction zones in the presence of water. Are you arguing that this object is perhaps a fragment of continental crust from a fragmented planet?
That might explain the shape, perhaps with an acquired coating.
A big impact might have been enough to kick it out of its own system, or at least get it started...a coating of oil...you said carbon right? Maybe a coal seam freed of its parent rock? Too fragile. Coated granite. Or maybe bedrock...with fossils maybe?
I've read that the observed featureless reddish spectrum was characteristic of D-type asteroids and the Martian moon Phobos, thought to be organic-rich silicates, carbon and anhydrous silicates, possibly with a water ice interior. The albedo was higher for Oumuamua than is typical for such objects, however. A largely metallic object covered with tholins* has also been suggested as a model. The former interpretation allows scope for outgassing to explain the observed non-gravitational acceleration but no coma was detected.
* Carl Sagan and Bishun Khare came up with the term tholins to describe the brown residue compounds that are synthesized by exposing simple carbon-containing compounds such as carbon dioxide, methane, or ethane, often in combination with nitrogen or water, to ultraviolet light, spark discharge, or cosmic rays. Tholin-like compounds are thought to be responsible for the smoggy haze appearance of Titan's atmosphere.
* Carl Sagan and Bishun Khare came up with the term tholins to describe the brown residue compounds that are synthesized by exposing simple carbon-containing compounds such as carbon dioxide, methane, or ethane, often in combination with nitrogen or water, to ultraviolet light, spark discharge, or cosmic rays. Tholin-like compounds are thought to be responsible for the smoggy haze appearance of Titan's atmosphere.
If Oumuamua was a sail using some kind of two-dimensional structure like graphene or some exotic nanotube weave it would have looked similar. Sadly, its all speculative unless another one like it shows up with plenty of time to watch for it.
It's a numbers game - at the moment more than 4000 planets have been discovered in various systems, quite a few of them in habitable zones so if one would extrapolate there's billions of planets where life as we know it could develop, so at least mathematically there are chances of intelligent civilizations out there.
Discovering or even communication is a whole different animal so even if this was an alien construct passing through our system it could either mean it's a rather simple probe at sublight speeds launched tens of or hundreds of thousands of year ago without a plan to directly contact other civilizations or it is a highly advanced probe or even manned, they took a look at us ( especially Trump's USA
) and decided to get back to us a couple of hundred years later to see if we're still here and grown up a bit.
It's fun to speculate but given there is so little data on the object it's basically useless and a waste of time to put real effort and energy into it. Then again we're on a message board so wasting time is the central point
Discovering or even communication is a whole different animal so even if this was an alien construct passing through our system it could either mean it's a rather simple probe at sublight speeds launched tens of or hundreds of thousands of year ago without a plan to directly contact other civilizations or it is a highly advanced probe or even manned, they took a look at us ( especially Trump's USA
) and decided to get back to us a couple of hundred years later to see if we're still here and grown up a bit.It's fun to speculate but given there is so little data on the object it's basically useless and a waste of time to put real effort and energy into it. Then again we're on a message board so wasting time is the central point
It is highly unlikely that the first object we detect of extra-solar origin would be intelligently-designed, isn't it? However, the fact that we discovered it so soon after we started looking suggests that such objects, natural or otherwise, might be surprisingly common. I wonder if there is a power law for size against frequency of occurrence as is often the case in the universe - many small ones but only a very few large ones.
It's a numbers game - at the moment more than 4000 planets have been discovered in various systems, quite a few of them in habitable zones so if one would extrapolate there's billions of planets where life as we know it could develop, so at least mathematically there are chances of intelligent civilizations out there.
Discovering or even communication is a whole different animal so even if this was an alien construct passing through our system it could either mean it's a rather simple probe at sublight speeds launched tens of or hundreds of thousands of year ago without a plan to directly contact other civilizations or it is a highly advanced probe or even manned, they took a look at us ( especially Trump's USA
It's fun to speculate but given there is so little data on the object it's basically useless and a waste of time to put real effort and energy into it. Then again we're on a message board so wasting time is the central point
Could Oum be a fragment from a planet that broke apart, maybe due to an asteroid that was large enough to shatter the planet?
Perhaps, it'll be interesting to see just how many similar objects we detect over several years or decades and how diverse in size, composition, and form they are.
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