Did anyone check if it is rotating and at the right rpm to produce planetary gravity inside?
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The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
91–100 of 114 posts
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#92I think it's a shame that this story hasn't gotten more attention. True, it doesn't tell us as much about the nature of the universe as the discovery of the Higgs boson, and it doesn't represent a major advance in engineering like gravitational wave detection. But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't…
But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't come until we send a probe to Proxima Centauri. While this is the only one we've seen so far, the current belief is that similar objects might actually quite common. A parallel newspaper article in the Guardian [1] cites a paper out of UCLA [2], and works thro…
SO worked with Dave and his lab while in grad school. On this stuff, Dave is right, trust him.
On most meteorite and asteroid science in the field, take it all with a grain of salt. There's not much data and they are pretty 'dark' as objects (low albeido, low mass/gravity, long periods, very tiny in a telescope, etc). Mostly, they are guessing at stuff. It's kinda funny how worked up they get over pretty much no data (as compared to other astro disciplines).
That said, extra-solar objects are super cool, bust mostly from an isotopic % standpoint. We then infer a lot from that stuff.
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#93I think it's a shame that this story hasn't gotten more attention. True, it doesn't tell us as much about the nature of the universe as the discovery of the Higgs boson, and it doesn't represent a major advance in engineering like gravitational wave detection. But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't…
But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't come until we send a probe to Proxima Centauri. While this is the only one we've seen so far, the current belief is that similar objects might actually quite common. A parallel newspaper article in the Guardian [1] cites a paper out of UCLA [2], and works thro…
If so many are passing through, and have been doing so for millions/billions of years, then at least a few thousand must have been captured. Line up the right planet and even a high-inclination object can be slowed enough to be trapped. It would be an interesting exercise to calculate what percentage of high-inclination objects might actually be alien.
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course an asteroid, hollowed out somewhat, makes for a good spaceship. Especially if you're trying to be covert. Perhaps someone has discovered warp drives (is gravitational wave detection the first step) and the Federation have sent a ship to observe us.
If you wanted to disguise a probe, it seems the ideal form would be a black body, not to disguise it as an asteroid, I would guess. Unless they're playing mind games. Anyways, given all the EM radiation we're tossing out into the void, some species' probe out there is going to pick up our existence sooner or later. And at ~395 earth-moon distances it's difficult to imagine how effective a 400-meter object, disguised…
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Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#95I recommend anyone interested read the paper which is available as a preprint from Nature (for the moment): goo.gl/cSsHoj (link shortened due to having an embedded access token). Some tantalizing points from the paper: - They constrained the aspect ratio in two dimensions to be 10:1:C, but the third dimension is unconstrained. Depending on which axis the object is rotating around, C could either be 1, or 20. Either o…
- strange aspect ratio - tensile strength (it should be cartwheeling, there is a physics theorem which means everything tends to this configuration) - large flat or concave sections. - others are reporting it's mostly metallic. I'll say it: did anyone consider an alien spaceship? The paper seems to deduce "asteroidal" by ruling out other things, rather than by a positive measurement of rock spectra, unless I've misre…
I doubt that any scientist working in academia would make such a claim. Career suicide, unless you're right and it's confirmed. Scientists tend to be a lot more cautious in their statements, unless they're looking for funding...
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#96What was its speed at closest sun approach? Because the speed of objects in our solar system are all very low compared to the speed of the nearest solar system compared to our sun, I imagine this could also be the fastest object ever to be obversed in our solar system.
Its speed peaked at 87.71 km/s at perihelion.
It looks like there was a sungrazer comet an order of magnitude faster than that at 600 km/s (2.16e6/3600), so this was not the fastest solar system object ever.
https://futurism.com/the-sun-just-killed-the-fastest-moving-...
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#97I recommend anyone interested read the paper which is available as a preprint from Nature (for the moment): goo.gl/cSsHoj (link shortened due to having an embedded access token). Some tantalizing points from the paper: - They constrained the aspect ratio in two dimensions to be 10:1:C, but the third dimension is unconstrained. Depending on which axis the object is rotating around, C could either be 1, or 20. Either o…
I thought the shape was a bit weird also. Most objects that we see are more like a rock but this is like a rod.
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Breakthrough Starshot could use I1/Oumuamua as a test object once they got some prototypes ready: After 8 years Oumuamua will be 6.64 billion km away (at 26.32km/s). A Starshot prototype probe flying at 1500km/s (0.5% of lightspeed c) could reach that distance in 51 days. Starshot hopes to achieve 20% c eventually.
Oh yea, I was going to mention this; thanks for the reminder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Potential_space... > The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) has studied potential options for sending a spacecraft to 1I/ʻOumuamua, perhaps using first a Jupiter flyby followed by a close solar flyby at 3 solar radii in order to take advantage of the Oberth effect. More advanced options of using solar, l…
Sure, it will zip past a 500m object in a fraction of a second.
Then again it will also zip by a planet in less than a second at 60,000km/s (20% c). They might as well solve that problem in the next 8 years.
Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#99Re: The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
#100Could we ever use a net to stick a probe to one and get a free trip out of the solar system?
I think that because it is moving so fast the net would have to be accelerated significantly so that it wouldn't just tear through the net.
Plus there's the issue of actually getting into position in time to setup all the maneuvers required to match the speed.