I humbly bow to your superior intellect! (snicker!<)
No, sincerely - but I think that you are getting unnecessarily technical in your explanation, as well as being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Before continuing, let me express agreement with the accusation made earlier in this thread that newspaper journalists, of course, go for the juicier headline and are hence more than willing to obfuscate the facts to that end.
In short: The article could have easily presented some simple fact making it perfectly clear that - barring some unimaginably unlikely scenario (multiple perfectly choreographed fly-bys) - the object must be of interstellar origin.
A specific example would be predicting the impact area on the Earth’s surface of say, the massive External Tank of the Space Shuttle.
That's a poor example, depending as it does so heavily upon the influence of the Earth's atmosphere. In the case at hand (this putatively interstellar object) - unless it's a comet (which I'm willing to stipulate, but which you, for some reason, didn't care to come out and mention explicitly as a possible "deal-breaker" for the interstellar hypothesis) - simple Newtonian mechanics and Kepler's Laws should suffice, nicht wahr?
Again, I'm not a scientist and am not pretending to argue here with scientific rigor - just on a par with the usual level of discourse here at Free Republic.
My understanding (based on this sloppy article, which didn't bother to present the prima facie evidence I would have wished for and which I really believe might already be available) is that the object had, at a point in space where the escape velocity of the Sun was, say, "X," a velocity of "X + k," where "k" is a positive number.
Wouldn't you say that, in the context of a popular science article, and a Free Republic thread, it would then be permissible to assume that the object in question is indeed extra-solar?
Regards,
> “No, sincerely - but I think that you are getting unnecessarily technical in your explanation, as well as being unnecessarily pessimistic.”
If you knew what the denizens of NASA do on a daily basis, you would understand better. There’s a reason why they are under constant threat of the budget ax. In order to return them to prestige, they claim more funding is needed and grander missions. That is not what they need. They need harsh oversight in a course where the tough survivors are rewarded greatly, making it Olympian to even gain employment in the agency, the way it was once.
NASA like so many other agencies of the federal government is overrun by political correctness. You should be skeptical of anything and everything they publish and claim to produce. Call them on the carpet and put them to the test. If they can’t take the pressure, let them quit.