Posted on 03/13/2019 9:01:54 AM PDT by BenLurkin
‘Oumuamua appeared to hit the gas on its way out of the inner solar system. The body went a tiny bit faster than it should have if the only effect on its motion was the Sun’s gravity dragging on it. The best guess... was that ices vaporized from ‘Oumuamua’s surface by the Sun’s stark glare had given the body an extra kick. However, no observations had detected such outgassing.
...The team revisited all the observations made during ‘Oumuamua’s whiplash visit and have concluded that outgassing could indeed be to blame.
The researchers looked at what would happen if incident sunlight created a thruster-like jet of water vapor at the spot on ‘Oumuamua that directly pointed at the Sun. As the body tumbled, this spot would change location, and so the jet created would migrate across the surface...
The tiny thrust from this migrating jet would cause the body to rock back and forth like a pendulum. This rocking would explain both the acceleration and the periodic pattern in ‘Oumuamua’s brightness, the researchers say....
But...[n]None of the authors’ plots of the object’s changes in brightness reproduce the real light curve, particularly the pointy minima naturally created by a spinning elongated object. “Just try spinning a cigar along its short axis, and you’ll see that the periods when you see it exposing [the] small cross-section pass quickly,” he explains.
Furthermore, the outgassing should have changed ‘Oumuamua’s spin. Astronomers saw the body’s acceleration drop by a factor of four from late October to late November 2017 as the object raced away from the Sun. If this change happened because less sunlight was reaching the object and, thus, sublimating less ice, then the period of ‘Oumuamua’s pendulum-like tumbling should have doubled, which wasn’t observed.
(Excerpt) Read more at skyandtelescope.com ...
Speeding up is fine.
Slowing down is not.................
Gee.... I wonder if something like a Jupiter-sized planet that has a highly elliptical orbit that only brings it near the Sun and Earth every 11,000-20,000 years could have sped up Oumuamua on it’s way out of the solar system ?
Well, they always said that President Oumuamua was "The Chosen One," so why not?
It’s just as likely that Oumuamua neither slowed down nor sped up. It was (like most objects in space) not even traveling a straight line. Most likely is that our measurements were off.
Why couldn’t ‘solar wind’ (which we claim could push a ‘solar sail’) slow Oumuamua down as it was approaching and speed it up as it exited ?
There was some sci-fi flick where some astronomers were monitoring some asteroid coming into the solar system and it suddenly slowed down..........it was not a rock................
Those who built Oumuamua do everything in threes.
That is very likely possible... Or it’s magnetic and the poles switched to like kind after it went by giving it a repulsion push rather than a previous pull.
Or maybe it heard it’s name one too many times thinking instead they were cat calls and it sped up out of fear of rape-rape.
Hey! US astronomers have a real mystery ... oh wait ... here’s the solution - how dumb were we to overlook something so simple. Mystery solved. Oh wait ... the answer does not fit the actual observations ...
Maybe is was an alien probe ... like the other one - a near twin - we do not like to mention again..
They only saw two - the famous one and another they do not like to mention again, having mentioned it only once.
One is just an oddity, two is not an oddity, three is some one knocking. Or more likely doing a survey looking for potential competitors to eliminate.
*ping*
Yeah, that happens but something caused this body to act differently from others visiting the solar system. The solar wind (given a certain intensity) would affect all bodies equally depending on surface area and mass. That brings to mind a possibility for Oumuamua to be pushed around a little more... if it is hollow!
Not to worry. There will be 2 more of them.
Don't all interstellar spaceships do that?
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Is such a thing even possible? Yes, it is. ;^)
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