🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Last year, astronomers announced they'd detected a comet from another solar system: 'Oumuamua.
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And while it may be gone from sight, it’s not yet gone from the solar system. According to Meech, ‘Oumuamua is expected to reach the Kuiper belt in about 2024, and pass the edge of the Kuiper belt in late 2025. It will pass the most distant location the Voyagers have reached, she says, in about 2038.
Outgassing is simply the process of gas and dust escaping from a comet as it nears the Sun and heats up, sublimating ices on the surface — turning them directly from a solid to a gas. As gas escapes, it gives the comet an extra push in the opposite direction, affecting its speed and rotation, giving it an extra push that deviates from gravitational effects. ‘Oumuamua’s motion “was the same level of strength as you would typically see comets,” says Meech. “So that didn’t seem unusual.
How else is ‘Oumuamua strange? Astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope for over 30 hours of observations of ‘Oumuamua in the infrared — or rather, Meech says, they tried. “They detected nothing,” she says, when looking in the thermal infrared, which detects heat. “So it was just an upper limit.” But sometimes even non-detections can provide information. “From this, they said, ‘Okay, if it has thermal properties typical of comets, then it’s going to have to be brighter than everyone thought.
“It’s always a little bit tricky to interpret too much out of not seeing something,” Meech cautions. But “yet again, it’s not quite hanging together as a typical comet.”‘Oumuamua was born in another solar system, so perhaps all these oddities are normal for something that formed somewhere else. The next question then becomes, “Where did it form?”
But even here, all was not straightforward. “The only problem with these four candidates is that the encounter velocities were relatively high, between about 10 and 25 kilometers per second,” she says. “‘Oumuamua is probably an ejected planetesimal or building block from the birth process of planets, and it’s pretty hard to get ejection velocities this high during that birth process, just from a planetesimal getting too close to giant planets.
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