Oumuamua Debate Goes On, NASA Kicks In

A high-profile scientist at Harvard still says that aliens may stand behind the mysterious flying object which has drawn so much attention since its visit in 2017. Now, the same idea is claimed by a NASA’s longtime scientist about Futurama. According to his research, the object may have broken apart before arriving in our solar system.

For now, there’re only a few things that everyone agrees about the Oumuamua. Those include its origin is outside the solar system, its unusually long shape, and its unexpected acceleration while flying out of the solar system.

When struggling to explain the strange features of this object, scientists have come up with several hypotheses, like a hunk of dark matter or a piece from an obliterated planet.

However, the most earth-shattering idea is from Avi Loeb, the astronomy chair at Harvard. In November, he suggested that Oumuamua could be in fact an alien spacecraft. This conclusion is drawn in his paper done with researcher Shmuel Bialy, which went viral quickly.

The most confusing fact about Oumuamua is that it moved faster as leaving the solar system. If it were a comet, the acceleration would result from being heated up by the Sun, releasing gas from its nucleus through holes and weak spots in its crust. But nothing like that can be spotted on Oumuamua, which means it was pushed and accelerated by something else.

According to Loeb, it could be the pressure from the Sun that provided Oumuamua with the boost. But this can be true only if the object is as thin as a sail on a ship. In fact, Loeb is also working on a project called Breathrough Starshot, developing a similar design to launch a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. Therefore, as stated by Loeb, Oumuamua is the proof that there’s an intelligent civilazzation out there steps ahead of us.

On the other hand, Zdenek Sekanina, a NASA’s longtime scientist, has come up with a different idea that’s nothing close to aliens. He said Oumuamua could really be the debris cloud left from an interstellar comet which broke apart not long before astronomers spotted it.

Last week, Sekanina posted a paper to the pre-print Arxiv server of Cornell:

By that, he means an interstellar comet came too close to the Sun, broke into pieces and generated a cloud of debris and dust which has a lower density than a big rock cigar. This could be the explanation for how the Sun exerted a weak radiation pressure but still enough to speed it up.

Nevertheless, Loeb doesn’t agree with Sekanina, at least for now.

In an email, Loeb wrote that:

Anyway, Sekanina still stands by his belief that his model makes sense and that a comet debris cloud doesn’t need well organizing to explain the movement of Oumuamua. The object is conceptualized by Sekanina:

So, it looks like the debate hasn’t settled, and we still have no idea what Oumuamua is exactly.