Oumuamua was that piece of rock that sailed through the solar system from interstellar space. Odd shape, and apparently it behaved strangely, taking on speed that it should not have.
*Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft. As they say in a paper to be published Nov. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
The researchers aren’t claiming outright that aliens sent Oumuamua. But after a careful mathematical analysis of the way the interstellar object sped up as it shot past the sun, they say Oumuamua could be a spacecraft pushed through space by light falling on its surface — or, as they put it in the paper, a “lightsail of artificial origin.”*
Or maybe it is a piece of an alien spaceship that broke off and floated away, and just happened to drift through our solar system.
When I saw this headline on Twitter I assumed it would be one of those stories where they take a small part of a science article out of context to make a clickbait headline but wow. This is really something if it pans out.
Except the problem is that little or no outgassing was observed. Oumuamua may have been composed of volatiles, but it looked like it might have had a metal[sup]*[/sup] crust thick enough to prevent them from burning off.
*“metal” here means heavier elements, some of which might not be in metal classes on the periodic table
It’s probably more accurate to say the null hypothesis is that Oumuamua is a piece of debris from outside the solar system. This paper only states that a light pressure model might explain extraneous accelerations, but they do not provide evidence of such a structure only a possible inference.
Sending a probe after it is easy. Catching up to it is pretty hard, and of course gets harder the longer we wait. Project Lyra has proposed some ideas.
In the unlikely event that it was a functioning alien artifact, chasing it down might be problematic: it is tiny and very hard to see and could be doing course corrections as it vanishes into the night. Though, if we could send out a fast probe and Oumuamua turned out to not be where its trajectory leads, meaning it has somehow deviated off path, would suggest that it was not just a rock. It would be an expensive way to not learn much.
Assuming it was an alien probe its going to take a very long time to return its observations to whoever sent it, isn’t it? Physically at least, I suppose it could transmit them ahead of itself.
Unless the ‘mother ship’ is hanging around just out of our visible range of course.
Artificial or not this ranks way up there with ‘neat stuff that happened in my lifetime’.
If it is “dead”, then how would it be affecting it’s path?
If it is “alive”, then how did it change it’s path without producing any gas output or anything? How is it being controlled? Is it sending a signal? Etc.
Too many questions to make “going there” sound reasonable.
Chalk it up to something like the Pioneer Anomaly. Maybe we’ll get lucky someday and a non-revolutionary explanation will be worked out.
(Remember, the Pioneer Anomaly at one time had explanations like a tweak to the laws of gravity, etc.)
The premise is that there is some sort of sail that would use sunlight/solar wind for impetus. Oumuamua itself is a pretty small thing, and any sail-like attachment would probably not be very east to image. Presumably the sail control mechanism is automated, controlled by some sort of BEC-QC embedded within the icy interior where it would be shielded from heat and radiation. Or something like that. The brainy guys were suggesting that the acceleration profile would have been consistent with sail power.
But the light curve strongly suggests it is tumbling. It doesn’t seem likely that a functional ship would be doing that. It could be a derelict though.
The first article I read suggested the acceleration was more than could reasonably be explained by outgassing. It would seriously rock if some of our radio telescopes picked up a burst signal from Oumuamua even if it used a compression algorithm we had no hope of decrypting.