October 14, 2017 was the date. Five days later the interstellar object was on its way out of the solar system when Robert Warwick an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa spotted it with the panoramic survey telescope. Rapid response system pan Stars, it was a strange object weird orbit weird speed and weird properties from the moment of its discovery. The strange object was named umwa, the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system, but here’s the thing: astronomers only had 11 days to observe the strange visitor as it was cruising out incredibly fast three times the speed at which Earth orbits the Sun. Then it appeared too small and too dim to be detected it left the solar system faster than it had entered never to return and here’s where it gets really interesting: while tracking umwamua we observed.
The object is thought to have come from the direction of Vega an alien star that resides 237 trillion kilometers away shaped like an elongated Cigar by the time it was spotted it h The first was its mysterious acceleration away from the sun, which was difficult to reconcile with many theories about what it might have been made of, and the second was its peculiar shape. Before Umwamua, the most elongated known space objects were three times longer than they were wide. In the years that followed, scientific journals and global media headlines swarmed with speculation: was it a block of solid hydrogen, a debris, or, as the esteemed Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested, an artificial construction made by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization? The odds of such behavior from a naturally occurring comet are extremely unlikely. By October 7, 2017, it was moving toward the Pegasus constellation, heading for unknown destinations.
With today’s technology, there was no way to catch up with and photograph whom Walmart was in close proximity, so the data at hand is all that we will ever have. It’s time to go exploring. A new study suggests that umua may be an alien spacecraft with a light sail. An artificial origin would explain quite nicely the many strange characteristics of the cosmic visitor. Scientists initially regarded the object as a common but reclassified it as an asteroid after observations failed to reveal a tale or fuzzy coma but a team of researchers once again branded umamua as a comet after noticing that it exhibits non-gravitational acceleration. He added another natural explanation if Walmart is just a fragment of a larger object. The observed motion could be due to the kick that knocked that fragment loose, but such a kick would only occur once, whereas Umwamua has shown repeated non-gravitational acceleration, so Bialy and Loeb proposed a new hypothesis that sunlight could be to blame. In the new study, the duo determined that solar radiation pressure could cause the observed non-gravitational movement. Ifum wamua has a thickness of 0.3 to 0.9 millimeters. What kind of structure could be so thin? Bialy and Loeb proposed a light sail designed to harness the momentum of photons as a propulsive force. This has already been demonstrated by humanity.
Space technology the alley and Loeb further calculated that a light sail umwamua could probably survive a long Interstellar Trek given the concentration of gas and dust in the interstellar medium and the speeds at which the object would encounter these deep space flex the researchers determined that umwamua could make it at least 16 000 light years from its home system whatever that may be as zumwamu as provenance Loeb was talking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is not speculation, he added, it is evidence-based we have an anomaly in the data the anomaly is that the orbit deviates from what gravity alone would do and the viable explanations for that do not exist other than the one that we are proposing to be clear bialy and lobard are not claiming in this study that umwa MOA is definitely an alien spacecraft but they do believe this is a real possibility The object could be alien space junk, a defunct sail craft that has found its way to us, or an active reconnaissance craft sent here to investigate our solar system. According to the study’s authors, there are reasons to favor the latter explanation. For starters, Loeb stated that umwamu’s Discovery was an outlier. In addition, umwamu’s motion is roughly coincident with the average motion of material in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy, a kinematic space known as the local standard of rest, which is why the object’s system of origin has been so difficult to pin down.
If I created an instrument whose identity I wanted to conceal, I would place it at the local standard of rest. According to Loeb, astronomers have used the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the Allen telescope array in Northern California to listen for any possible pings coming from umamua. To date, the object has remained silent, but regardless of what it is, the Discovery is quite fascinating a strange visitor from a far away star system shaped like nothing we’ve ever seen in our own solar system neighborhood here’s what we know so far.
