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ReutersApril 16, 2020 09:13:01 IST
A reddish cigar-shaped interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua’ that is falling through our solar system may be remnants of a shattered planet when it got too close to the distant star it once orbited, according to researchers.
Scientists have been puzzled by origin and nature ‘Oumuamua since its discovery in 2017, and some even propose that it may be an alien spacecraft. Astronomers Yun Zhang and Doug Lin, in research published this week, said computer simulations indicated that it was a remnant of a planet or planetary building block wiped out by a star’s “tidal forces”.
Artist’s impression of the Oumuamua space object. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Um Oumuamua, the first object from another star system to traverse our solar system, is about 400 meters long. Its elongated shape, curious movement and dry appearance, for example, without a tail of dust and gases, indicated that it is not an ordinary comet or asteroid.
When a the smaller body passes close to a much larger one, the tidal forces exerted by the larger body can crush the smaller one. This is what happened when a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 traveled too close to the planet Jupiter in 1992.
“Most planetary bodies consist of numerous pieces of rock that have fused together under the influence of gravity. You could imagine them as sandcastles floating in space. Its structure can be affected when the force acting on the individual “sand particle” is greater than its mutual gravity, “said Zhang, a researcher at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France.
“Like ocean tides on Earth, which result from the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon, in space, a planetary body that gets close enough to a star is subject to the strong gravitational pulls of that star,” added Zhang, whose findings appear in the magazine Astronomy of nature.
The near and far parts of the planet would separate into pieces, forming an elongated band of debris, with some fragments then merging to form um Oumuamua-shaped objects, added Lin, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The star probably had between one-tenth and eight-tenths of the mass of our sun or potentially an exotic type of relatively cool, dense star called a white dwarf, Lin said.
“Our scenario offers an attractive and viable alternative to the widely publicized alien spacecraft proposal,” said Zhang.
The study suggests the existence of many objects formed in this way.
“We show the possibility of panspermia carried by these objects,” said Zhang, referring to the hypothetical spread of microorganisms or chemical precursors of life on objects that rush through space.
‘Oumuamua, which means” messenger from afar “in the native language of Hawaii, is traveling outside the solar system and it will reach the orbital distance of Uranus in August.
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