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Could 'Oumuamua be an Extraterrestrial Solar Sail?

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 07 2018, @11:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-not-saying-it-was-aliens dept.

EventH0rizon writes:

Two Harvard astronomers have suggested that the interstellar object that passed through our solar system in late 2017 and early 2018 could have been part of an alien spacecraft.

Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, two astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, suggested the cigar-shaped object — given the Hawaiian name 'Oumuamua, which NASA notes "means a messenger from afar arriving first" — could have been a discarded light sail of extra-terrestrial origin, perhaps sent here on purpose.

From the paper:

We explain the excess acceleration of `Oumuamua away from the sun as the result of the force that the sunlight exerts on its surface. For this force to explain measured excess acceleration, the object needs to be extremely thin, of order a fraction of a millimeter in thickness but tens of meters in size. This makes the object lightweight for its surface area and allows it to act as a light-sail. Its origin could be either natural (in the interstellar medium or proto-planetary disks) or artificial (as a probe sent for a reconnaissance mission into the inner region of the solar system)."

It's not hard to find plenty of the usual skepticism, much of which seems to center on whether or not the object outgassed on the way into our solar system, and it's shape. The gist of the Harvard paper seems to be that the object would need to be extremely thin and not at all like the rocky artists rendering that has commonly been used in stories to date.

What do Soylentils think of this latest twist?

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  • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Wednesday November 07 2018, @11:57AM (3 children)

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @11:57AM (#758913)

    Iapetus
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iapetus_(moon) [wikipedia.org]

    The plot of 2001

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday November 07 2018, @01:13PM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @01:13PM (#758938)
    Since we're talking SciFi plots, besides the obvious parallels with the "Rama" books by Arthur C. Clarke, another one is the method the protomolecule was originally sent to our solar system onboard Phoebe in the plot of "The Expanse" series by James S.A. Corey. In that scenario we very literally just dodged a bullet.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 07 2018, @01:55PM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @01:55PM (#758944)

    > Iapetus

    The difference is that for Iapetus is tidally locked, so that one can define a "front" and "back" and the front picks up dust/etc. It is hard to imagine a mechanism for a similar asymmetry to arise on a spinning object.