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I'll ask what everyone is thinking but won't say. If the acceleration is in fact being caused by artificial thrusters, what kind of thruster configuration can produce prograde acceleration while maintaining the observed tumble? And why would someone engineer this configuration?
I am truly surprise that we don't get more interstellar visitors into our solar system. It kind shows how small our solar system is, or other way, how big the universe is.
The Dig comes to my mind from 1995.
I'll ask what everyone is thinking but won't say. If the acceleration is in fact being caused by artificial thrusters, what kind of thruster configuration can produce prograde acceleration while maintaining the observed tumble? And why would someone engineer this configuration?
> And why would someone engineer this configuration? To make its being engineered seem implausible, surely.
I'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'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.
> The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean it’s all relative 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
I'll ask what everyone is thinking but won't say. If the acceleration is in fact being caused by artificial thrusters, what kind of thruster configuration can produce prograde acceleration while maintaining the observed tumble? And why would someone engineer this configuration?
It's maybe worth pointing out the tumbling is a hypothesis used to explain variable brightness measurements and not something that was observed directly. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.00437.pdf For all anyone knows the intrinsic brightness was variable. (This is probably not very likely without some supporting spectroscopic anomalies. But still.) As for thrusters - that's the same problem as the comet and outgassing hyp…
Someone just f'ed up the config files?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean it’s all relative 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
What I meant was, the origin of the object may have been in a different inertial frame of reference to our solar system, so the 'spin' as far as it is concerned is not spin.
Earlier 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.
They’d make great protection from high speed space debris.
I am truly surprise that we don't get more interstellar visitors into our solar system. It kind shows how small our solar system is, or other way, how big the universe is.
I mean, we just discovered ten new moons of Jupiter this year: http://earthsky.org/space/10-new-moons-discovered-jupiter-1-...
