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WASHINGTON, April 14th. (Reuters). A reddish cigar-shaped interstellar object called Oumuamua crossing the solar system may be the rest of a shattered planet that was too close to a distant star when it was in orbit. According to the researchers.
The artist’s impression is shown by the first known interstellar object that visited the solar system, ‘Oumuamua. European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser / via REUTERS ATTENTION TO EDITORS – THIS PICTURE IS SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY.
Scientists have been puzzled by the origin and nature of Oumuamua since its discovery in 2017, and some even suggested that it might be an alien spaceship.
Astronomers Yun Zhang and Doug Lin, in a study published this week, said computer simulations showed that it was the remnant of a planet or planetary formation destroyed by the tidal forces of a star.
The mind of Oumuamua, the first object in another stellar system passing through ours, has a length of about 400 meters. Its elongated shape, strange movement and dry appearance, without a tail of dust and gases, indicate that this is not a comet or an ordinary asteroid.
When a smaller body passes close to a much larger one, tidal forces acting on the larger body can crush the smaller one. This is what happened when a comet named Shoemaker – Levy-9 in 1992 traveled too close to Jupiter.
“Most planetary bodies are made up of numerous pieces of rock that have merged together under the influence of gravity. You can imagine them as sand castles floating in space. Their structuring may be interrupted when the force acting on individual “sand particles” exceeds their mutual gravity, ”said Zhang, a researcher at the Cote d’Azur Observatory in France.
“Like the ocean tides on Earth that result from the gravitational effects of the Sun and Moon, in space, a planetary body that is close enough to a star is subject to the strong gravitational effects of this star,” he added. Zhang, whose findings appear in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Near and far parts of the planet will be divided into parts, forming an elongated strip of debris, with some fragments that will subsequently merge into objects such as Oumuamua, added Lin, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Lin said that the star probably had from one tenth to eight tenths of the mass of our sun, or perhaps an exotic type of relatively cool, dense star called a white dwarf.
“Our scenario offers an attractive and viable alternative to the widely publicized offer of an alien spacecraft,” said Zhang.
Research assumes the existence of many objects formed in this way.
“We show the possibility of the panspermia that these objects carry,” said Zhang, referring to the hypothetical spread of microorganisms or chemical precursors of life to objects that roam through space.
Um Omuamua, which in Hawaii means “messenger from afar,” travels outside the solar system and in August will reach the orbital distance of Uranus.
Will Dunham Report; Edited in Spanish by Javier Lopez de Lleida
