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The strange interstellar object ‘Oumuamua may, in fact, be a kind of kite, after all. In October 2017, it was discovered while passing through the Solar System, but unlike 2I / Borisov, which also came from another corner of the galaxy, not much is known about this cigar-shaped object.
Initially, ‘Oumuamua was listed as a comet. However, it did not emit any visible tail or anything that would point to a gas emission from the space rock. Therefore, it was soon reclassified as an asteroid.
In addition to the elongated shape never before seen in space, the researchers also discovered at that time that ‘Oumuamua is covered by a kind of insulation layer made up of organic elements. This made everything even more mysterious, even with many hypotheses that it was an artificial object made by aliens.
Now, a new study suggests that ‘Oumuamua is likely to be the fragment of a larger body that was ripped apart by gravitational forces during a flyby on its native star. That would explain the large number of asteroid-like interstellar objects, according to the study’s lead author Yun Zhang.
Another curious detail is that the celestial body experienced a “non-gravitational acceleration” during its visit to the Solar System. This means that its trajectory cannot be attributed to the gravity of the Sun, Jupiter, or other large objects. This movement can be caused by the outflow of cometary gases, which can push an object in the same way that propellers propel a spacecraft.
In their new study, Zhang and his team used computer simulations to investigate how objects are affected by flybys on their native stars. The work revealed that at some proximity, bodies can break into elongated fragments, which are then launched into interstellar space.
With extreme heating during the flyby and cooling away from the star, these fragments develop a crust on the surface, helping to maintain their strange shape. The focus heat also “consumes large amounts of volatiles, according to Zhang, which explains the reddish color of the ‘Oumuamua” surface and the absence of a visible coma (the cloud of dust and gas surrounding the nucleus of a comet) .
However, some volatiles such as water ice may have been below the surface in condensed form. These hidden volatiles can “activate” during encounters with other stars like our Sun, creating gases and triggering non-gravitational movements.
The study, published Monday (13) in the journal Nature Astronomy, further suggests that fragments like ‘Oumuamua may be pieces of comets, planetary bodies, or even planets known as” super-Earths. ” Objects may even have drifted away from stars that have already “died”, such as white dwarfs. “These interstellar objects can provide critical clues to how planetary systems form and evolve,” said Zhang.
Although there are plans to chase ‘Oumuamua with a ship, we will probably never know for sure what it really is. But the research is useful mainly because we should expect to find many other interstellar objects like this in the future. Zhang believes that, on average, a single planetary system should eject a total of approximately one hundred billion objects like ‘Oumuamua. The gravitational forces of the simulations work for anyone we find, regardless of their origin.
Source: Space.com
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