The mystery surrounding Oumuamua, the first interstate object known to have been a visitor to our Solar system, has been exposed in new research published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The text provides the first clues as to how it was formed and where it may have come from. The investigation, by Yun Zhang, of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its co-author Douglas NC Lin, from the University of California, used computer simulations to show their origin under the influence of tidal forces such as those in Earth’s oceans.
The Oumuamua is an interstellar object that has an elongated body and which was discovered on October 19, 2017 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1).
“We showed that Oumuamua-like interstellar objects can be produced through extensive fragmentation of the tides during close encounters of their parent bodies with their host stars, and then be ejected into interstellar space,” said Lin, who is also a professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Lin also indicates that Oumuamua bears no resemblance to anything in our Solar System: its surface is dry, its shape unusually elongated, and it has a puzzling movement. He confesses that some of the scientists came to question whether it was an alien probe.
“It is truly a mysterious object, but some signs, such as its colors and the absence of radio emission, point to Oumuamua as a natural object,” Zhang explained in the text.
These features distinguish it from comets, for example, and make it similar to rocky bodies like asteroids in the Solar System, say scientists, who consider it likely that there is a long-standing population of interstellar objects.
The researchers also found that if the object is close enough, the star can break it into elongated fragments that are then ejected into interstellar space, the magazine explained.
– .
