Mysterious object Oumuamua may be a fragment of a small interstellar comet, which disintegrated shortly before the closest approach to the Sun, astronomer NASA said in a study published on the Cornell University (USA) preprint server.
There is reason to believe that we did not observe the object itself that fell into the solar system at the beginning of 2017, but its fragment. Given that the time and place of the collapse is unknown, this may make it difficult to determine its native star system.
-Zdenek Sekanina, the author of the study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Since the interstellar object Oumuamua was first seen with Pan-STARRS telescopes in October 2017, it has aroused great interest among scientists. Besides the fact that its classification is constantly changing from asteroid to comet, it also stands out for its unusual highly elongated form and non-gravitational acceleration, which led to the emergence of several rather interesting theories, including artificial origin.
However, the work of Zdenek Sekanina can reconcile the not yet found explanations of the contradictory data about Oumuamua and, finally, reveal its true nature.
The study is based on the findings of the American astronomer John Bortl, who specialized in the study of comets and showed that some of them, having approached the Sun at a distance of less than 1 astronomical unit, may experience an unexpected decay. At the same time, sometimes after such events, a fragment of considerable size from weakly bound dust grains remains, which will be extremely porous, practically devoid of water, have an exotic shape, erratic rotation, do not show degassing and be subjected to pressure of solar radiation. Such a description is perfect for Oumuamua.
For example, the first thing that astronomers managed to learn from observations of a mysterious rocky object was its rather strange shape, resembling a cigar. Then it was found that Oumuamua, in contrast to small asteroids and planetesimals of the Solar System, has a chaotic rotation (then it was explained by collisions with other objects). And finally, the “guest” was observed non-gravitational acceleration, which is typical of comets, ejecting material from the surface during approach to the Sun. But at Oumuamua, degassing was not observed, therefore solar radiation was assigned to be responsible for his strange movement.
While researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA) explained all these oddities to the artificial origin of Oumuamua, Zdenek Sekanina offers a completely natural scenario and indicates the need to analyze archival data from August 2017, which can capture the moment of primary disintegration interstellar comet.
Origin of Oumuamua, new theory
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