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Interstellar Object Being Probed for Life

calamity

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Well, how did it achieve enough velocity to escape the gravity in it's original solar system? Remnants of a system whose star went super nova, perhaps.
 
Well, how did it achieve enough velocity to escape the gravity in it's original solar system?

Well, it may have never established a stable orbit in an "original solar system" in the first place. A forming solar system is a chaotic place, lots of collisions and near misses. Staggering amounts of energy can be involved. It could also be on the other end of the time scale - something ejected during the end of a solar system. A supernova ejects entire solar systems' worth of materials... it's how we got here in the first place!

Any random asteroid encountering Jupiter at the wrong angle and speed can be flung out into deep space.
 

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Well, how did it achieve enough velocity to escape the gravity in it's original solar system? Remnants of a system whose star went super nova, perhaps.

perhaps a super nova
 
Its weird shape is what has scientists wondering just what the hell it is. Also, when you think about it, the other big question is. How exactly does an asteroid travel between solar systems by its own impetus?

Well, it may have never established a stable orbit in an "original solar system" in the first place. A forming solar system is a chaotic place, lots of collisions and near misses. Staggering amounts of energy can be involved. It could also be on the other end of the time scale - something ejected during the end of a solar system. A supernova ejects entire solar systems' worth of materials... it's how we got here in the first place!

Any random asteroid encountering Jupiter at the wrong angle and speed can be flung out into deep space.

Indeed. Even in our own solar system there are theories about various gravitation interplay between the planets that had catastrophic results.

Jupiter kicked a giant planet out of the solar system 4 billion years ago

Did Jupiter Destroy the Solar System’s First Planets?

One of the other theories, which may also be covered in the citations is that Jupiter and Saturn has a period where they had gravitational influence on each other, which ended up speeding up Saturn to a more distant orbit. If gravitational interplay can do that to a planet the size of Saturn, it could surely send an object of that size into deep space.

So astronomers are going to listen in on 4 radio bands for any sign of intelligent life and radio communication. The spectrum for radio waves is so huge that its more likely they aren't going to capture any signals that another intelligent life form would be using, if they are on board at all.
 
Its weird shape is what has scientists wondering just what the hell it is. Also, when you think about it, the other big question is. How exactly does an asteroid travel between solar systems by its own impetus?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...hnology/ar-BBGCXco?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Aliens? Maybe not. Weird? Absolutely

It looks like the Heavens are taking pot shots at us.

Well, I'm kicking myself that we're not up there on it.

85 times the distance to the moon it passed, that's almost a quarter the distance to the Sun.
 
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It looks like the Heavens are taking pot shots at us.

Well, I'm kicking myself that we're not up there on it.

85 times the distance to the moon it passed, that's almost a quarter the distance to the Sun.

21.5 million miles. Probably take two years to get there. And, that's if we had something ready that we could just point and shoot.
 
21.5 million miles. Probably take two years to get there. And, that's if we had something ready that we could just point and shoot.

At 196,000 mph, this is three times our speed around the sun we're going to have to catch up with it, deploy the far intercepts, strap on engines, turn that baby around and let's study it. I bet it was the crust of some planet that was so torn it launched on a trajectory out of it's solar system.

Do you want to calculate how far it will get before we have the technology to catch up with it? 1.752 Billion miles or 188 AU per year. There are nearly sixty four thousand Astronomical Units in a light year, so in 335 years it should be one light year distant.

We should get a good mark on it's trajectory, it would make a hot yacht, 400 meters long, that's a quarter of a mile.
 
At 196,000 mph, this is three times our speed around the sun we're going to have to catch up with it, deploy the far intercepts, strap on engines, turn that baby around and let's study it. I bet it was the crust of some planet that was so torn it launched on a trajectory out of it's solar system.

Do you want to calculate how far it will get before we have the technology to catch up with it? 1.752 Billion miles or 188 AU per year. There are nearly sixty four thousand Astronomical Units in a light year, so in 335 years it should be one light year distant.

We should get a good mark on it's trajectory, it would make a hot yacht, 400 meters long, that's a quarter of a mile.

Is it going to stay in our solar system? I haven't read enough about it to know if it's moving to fast for the sun to capture it.
 
Is it going to stay in our solar system? I haven't read enough about it to know if it's moving to fast for the sun to capture it.

I'm pretty sure this one is on its way out, but objects like these can have a momentum where they orbit the Sun for awhile and then eventually get thrown off.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on Oumuamua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua in Hawaiian we enunciate each vowel: Oh oo moo a moo a.

It only goes 196 T close to the sun, farther out it's less than one third as fast.

There are four balance points in an orbit, far side of the sun, toward to the sun and perpendicular from there to the orbit. It would be fun to have stations with intercept craft in each of these and the moons, a couple orbiting the moon and another dozen out further.
 
It's hard not to think of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, when considering Oumuamua.
 
Well, how did it achieve enough velocity to escape the gravity in it's original solar system? Remnants of a system whose star went super nova, perhaps.

Perhaps. But the universe is full of matter that is not trapped in solar gravity wells. This object, as it turns out, is now trapped in ours. The object is traveling 196k mph, while the escape velocity of the Sun is about 1.4m mph.

I think the more important test of whether it is an alien spacecraft is to watch it and see if it leaves our solar system. ;)

An alien race that travels all the way to our solar system just to enter an orbit where most of their time is spent way out towards the Kuiper belt (to the tune of thousands of years) would be pretty boring..
 
It's hard not to think of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, when considering Oumuamua.

My thought exactly... and likely the first thing on the mind of all of these scientists... though I guess they don't want to get people's hopes up by just calling it Rama.
 
My thought exactly... and likely the first thing on the mind of all of these scientists... though I guess they don't want to get people's hopes up by just calling it Rama.



Yeah, still it would have been cool for them to give a nod to old Arthur C and name it Rama. Easier to pronounce too. :)
 
Yeah, still it would have been cool for them to give a nod to old Arthur C and name it Rama. Easier to pronounce too. :)

True, but they are optimists. They are saving "Rama" for the real deal. ;)
 
True, but they are optimists. They are saving "Rama" for the real deal. ;)

Hare Krishna could have had his Name on the first of it's kind asteroid; to bad, this is because we didn't vote Al Gore in 2000.

Oumuamua the moo sounds like a cow and Hare Krishna loves cows.
 
Well, how did it achieve enough velocity to escape the gravity in it's original solar system? Remnants of a system whose star went super nova, perhaps.

Escape velocity from a solar system is not all that high. Objects are thrown out all the time, as well as being captured and brought into a solar system.

Perhaps. But the universe is full of matter that is not trapped in solar gravity wells. This object, as it turns out, is now trapped in ours. The object is traveling 196k mph, while the escape velocity of the Sun is about 1.4m mph.

No, it is not trapped in ours. It is on a hyperbolic course, and is already on an outbound course. It has picked up speed thanks to the slingshot effect, but since it has already passed the sun it is actually slowing down again. It will be leaving the system at about the same speed it entered it at.

It is estimated that it entered the system at 26 km/s, reached a peak speed of 88 km/s as it passed the sun and Mercury, and will depart at 26 km/s.

And you are way off on your escape velocity. Voyager I has already exited the Solar System, and is passing through interstellar space. And it is only traveling at 17 km/s.
 
No, it is not trapped in ours. It is on a hyperbolic course, and is already on an outbound course. It has picked up speed thanks to the slingshot effect, but since it has already passed the sun it is actually slowing down again. It will be leaving the system at about the same speed it entered it at.

It is estimated that it entered the system at 26 km/s, reached a peak speed of 88 km/s as it passed the sun and Mercury, and will depart at 26 km/s.

And you are way off on your escape velocity. Voyager I has already exited the Solar System, and is passing through interstellar space. And it is only traveling at 17 km/s.

Correct, sorry, the escape velocity of the solar system is not a constant number, and increases as you get closer to the sun. The 620 kps I quoted is the escape velocity from the surface of the sun, whoops.

On that note, at a distance of 1 AU the solar escape velocity is 42 kps, but any craft leaving earth's orbit starts with Earth's inherent orbital speed of 30 kps. Voyager's 17 kps is recessional speed, which is relative to the speed of the Earth, but an aggregated speed of 47 kps.

Anyway, it turns out that yes, it is interstellar. At 1 AU the object was clocked traveling at 49.67 kps, just a bit faster than Voyager, and about 7 kps faster than solar escape velocity at that orbital distance.
 
Its weird shape is what has scientists wondering just what the hell it is. Also, when you think about it, the other big question is. How exactly does an asteroid travel between solar systems by its own impetus?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...hnology/ar-BBGCXco?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Aliens? Maybe not. Weird? Absolutely

[h=3]Centauri Dreams — Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration[/h]https://www.centauri-dreams.org/



Life and pulsars don't seem to mix. But science fiction hasn't shied away from making the connection, as witness Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg (Ballantine, 1980). In the novel, a species called the cheela live on the surface of a neutron star, coping with a surface gravity 67 billion times stronger than that of Earth.About · ‎Oumuamua: Listening To An ... · ‎Europa: Two Takes on Plate ...



 
Its weird shape is what has scientists wondering just what the hell it is. Also, when you think about it, the other big question is. How exactly does an asteroid travel between solar systems by its own impetus?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...hnology/ar-BBGCXco?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Aliens? Maybe not. Weird? Absolutely

Newton's first law. An object that is at rest, stays at rest, and an object that is moving (at constant speed) stays at constant speed --unless a force is imparted on it. The only reason objects on the Earth stop after a short distance is because gravity pulls them to the Earth and they hit the Earth --and then friction or collisions change the motion. But if you look at people on space stations far away from Earth's gravity --if they throw a wrench, that wrench just keeps on floating until it hits a wall. In space, there are no walls so objects (e.g. a comet) just keep on floating. Even for huge distances, whether that's between solar systems or even galaxies.
 
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