06-27-2018, 10:37 AM
Update on interstellar object Oumuamua
Rob Weryk was looking at the observations recorded by a telescope perched on top of a volcano in Hawaii (and) noticed an unusual object. Unlike everything else in our solar system, it didn’t seem to be orbiting the sun. It was zooming across the night sky, carving out its own path through our little home in the universe.
... then they started to see something strange in their data, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, which continued to track Oumuamua after it faded from view from even the most powerful ground-based telescopes ... “the path was not behaving as it would if it were just merely controlled by the sun’s gravity,” says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and one of the discoverers of Oumuamua. Something else was giving Oumuamua an extra push.
If you guessed that extra push was a rocket engine, you wouldn't be all that far off. It was caused by a more natural phenomenon known as outgassing (and without an interstellar Scotty "giv'n her all she's got, captain") changing it's trajectory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...et/563858/
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard
Rob Weryk was looking at the observations recorded by a telescope perched on top of a volcano in Hawaii (and) noticed an unusual object. Unlike everything else in our solar system, it didn’t seem to be orbiting the sun. It was zooming across the night sky, carving out its own path through our little home in the universe.
... then they started to see something strange in their data, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, which continued to track Oumuamua after it faded from view from even the most powerful ground-based telescopes ... “the path was not behaving as it would if it were just merely controlled by the sun’s gravity,” says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and one of the discoverers of Oumuamua. Something else was giving Oumuamua an extra push.
If you guessed that extra push was a rocket engine, you wouldn't be all that far off. It was caused by a more natural phenomenon known as outgassing (and without an interstellar Scotty "giv'n her all she's got, captain") changing it's trajectory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...et/563858/
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard
“We do this thing not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”