Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t such an object be emitting radio signals that earth could receive?
Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#52Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#53I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
Look at it from a sampling bias perspective. The object at its brightest was very dim (19th magnitude) and moving fast. The ability for rapid, repeating full sky surveys is recent (PanSTARRS had been online for around a decade). The limiting magnitude of PanSTARRS is 24th. So if such other such objects exist, of course we are going to find the closest ones first since they are the brightest.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#54I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#55I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
This has always fascinated me. We can actually build giant spaceships (space stations) inside asteroids and use them for interstellar travel. All the resources we need, including ice would be at our disposal. Like traveling with your own mini-planet. Dirk Schulze had taken that as a subject into his sci-fiction book - Alien Encounter.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always fascinated me. We can actually build giant spaceships (space stations) inside asteroids and use them for interstellar travel. All the resources we need, including ice would be at our disposal. Like traveling with your own mini-planet. Dirk Schulze had taken that as a subject into his sci-fiction book - Alien Encounter.
From an energy perspective, it's likely better to build your own station (from an asteroid - or alternative, remove all the mass from the asteroid that you don't need) - that way, you're only accelerating exactly the mass that you need, not wasting any energy accelerating the rest of an asteroid.
Asteroid are per definition not interstellar though (until Oumuamua?).
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#57I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
I prefer a complementary theory -- that it's a spent stage of a multi-stage spacecraft. If the primary stage were decelerating for a rendezvous with Earth, then any stage that made it to full acceleration would reach us first, probably getting close and then flinging back out of the solar system, just like this did. Easy enough to test -- we'll eventually see another object following the same trajectory, give or take…
It's fun to speculate, but I'm sure the reality of the situation is far more boring.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#58I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always fascinated me. We can actually build giant spaceships (space stations) inside asteroids and use them for interstellar travel. All the resources we need, including ice would be at our disposal. Like traveling with your own mini-planet. Dirk Schulze had taken that as a subject into his sci-fiction book - Alien Encounter.
For the book, the reviews on Goodreads aren't very good :-/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18268008-alien-encounter
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#60I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
That is incorrect. All motion is not relative, only intertial motion is relative. Spinning implies acceleration on a body which is measurably different from any reference frame compared to a body that is not accelerating