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Artist’s impression of the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system, ‘Oumuamua.
A reddish cigar-shaped interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua that is falling through our solar system may be remnants of a shattered planet when it wandered too close to the distant star it once orbited, according to researchers.
Scientists have been puzzled by the origin and nature of ‘Oumuamua since its discovery in 2017, and some have even suggested 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”.
‘Oumuamua, the first object from another star system found while passing through our solar system, is approximately a quarter of a mile (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 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. Their structure can be interrupted when the force acting on the ‘particle of ‘Individual sand is greater than their mutual gravity,’ said Zhang, a researcher at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur 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 journal Nature Astronomy.
The near and far parts of the planet would separate into pieces, forming an elongated band of debris, and some fragments would fuse to form ‘Oumuamua’ shaped objects, added Lin, an astrophysicist at the University of California at 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.
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“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 will reach the orbital distance of Uranus in August.
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