71–80 of 118 posts
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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.
This is not a thing though. Spin is spin, regardless of reference.
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.
There's a good chance these sorts of things are whizzing past us all the time, and we're just not detecting them. I mean, we just discovered ten new moons of Jupiter this year: http://earthsky.org/space/10-new-moons-discovered-jupiter-1-...
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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.
Now for a space ship, I agree. Though even then you might benefit from that extra matter in the same way.
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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…
"And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes."
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This is not a thing though. Spin is spin, regardless of reference.
I really misunderstand my relativity then.
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This is not a thing though. Spin is spin, regardless of reference.
I really misunderstand my relativity then.
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What’s special about 0.163 AU? Does it have a mathematical significance?
Just that it's unusually close.
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Great series of books! Every time I see a thread about this big rock I think of Rama.
Beg to differ. Great book. Awful cheap hacks posing as sequels. I regret reading them - they've nearly ruined the original for me.
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Great series of books! Every time I see a thread about this big rock I think of Rama.
Beg to differ. Great book. Awful cheap hacks posing as sequels. I regret reading them - they've nearly ruined the original for me.
That's the only way to explain how awful some of his last books were.
Having said that, I liked Richter 10. Too bad the co-author died before they could write another one.
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 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…