A couple of months ago Astronomy.com reported that the interstellar object that zoomed through our solar system appears to have been a comet:
In the new study, published June 27 in the journal Nature, researchers determined that ‘Oumuamua is slowly and steadily accelerating away from the Sun, which means it’s currently traveling faster than is predicted by celestial mechanics — a very well-understood branch of astronomy that deals with the motions of cosmic objects.
“Our high-precision measurements of ‘Oumuamua’s position revealed that there was something affecting its motion other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and planets,” said team-lead Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency in a NASA news release.
The researchers explored a number of possible scenarios in an attempt to explain the faster-than-expected speed with which ‘Oumuamua is hurtling out of the solar system. But after considering all the possibilities (such as solar-radiation pressure, friction-like forces, and magnetic interactions with the solar wind), the team concluded the most likely explanation is that the Sun is causing ‘Oumuamua to vent gas and dust from its surface in a process called outgassing, which almost exclusively occurs in icy comets, not rocky asteroids.
The assumption being no intelligence deliberately altering course, of course. They do note the lack of coma & tail, which they attribute to the small particles causing same to having been exhausted. The comet may be dissolving into bigger fragments.
And, as a science geek, it’s nice to get back to charismatic science – it’s uplifting to the spirit. Unlike politics.
