Scientists presented a plausible explanation for the first interstellar object to enter our solar system. The theory dispels far-reaching theories that it was an alien spacecraft.
Oumuamua, a 377-foot-long cigar-shaped object that moved at a whopping 97,200 miles per hour, was detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii in October 2017. Its properties baffled scientists; it accelerated when passing by the sun as comets do, but it didn’t produce the “tail” of ice and dust that most other observed comets have. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute declared the object was possibly an “alien artifact,” the Daily Mail reported. Scientists have since been trying to come up with a number of more plausible explanations.
The latest theory, proposed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University, stipulates that the object was propelled by the heating of hydrogen trapped within it. That hydrogen then formed a thin shell around it that was enough to make it accelerate but thin enough that it wasn’t visible to Earth.
According to the paper published in Nature, titled “Acceleration of 1I/‘Oumuamua from radiolytically produced H2 in H2O ice,” “the acceleration of Oumuamua is due to the release of entrapped molecular hydrogen that formed through energetic processing of an H2O-rich icy body. In this model, Oumuamua began as an icy planetesimal that was irradiated at low temperatures by cosmic rays during its interstellar journey, and experienced warming during its passage through the Solar System.”
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“For a comet several kilometers across, the outgassing would be from a really thin shell relative to the bulk of the object, so both compositionally and in terms of any acceleration, you wouldn’t necessarily expect that to be a detectable effect,” Jenny Bergner, one of the authors of the study, told the Daily Mail.
“But because Oumuamua was so small, we think that it actually produced sufficient force to power this acceleration,” she continued.
