Oumuamua's mysterious past

Oumuamua's mysterious past

Scientists have found that the first interstellar visitor to our system had an interesting past, which caused its chaotic motion.

Oumuamua swept through the solar system in October 2017 and was initially perceived as a comet. Later it was transferred to the category of asteroids with an extremely elongated shape (resembled a cigar).

Since its inception, representatives of the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University in Belfast have taken up the study. They were interested in the analysis of changes in the brightness of a celestial body. It turns out that Oumuamua is not characterized by periodic rotation, as for most small asteroids. Together this was observed destruction or chaotic rotation, programmed for billions of years.

It is difficult to identify the exact cause, but it is believed that Oumuamua collided with another asteroid and when struck, he was pushed into interstellar space. The computer model assumes that the fall will last many billions and even hundreds of billions of years, until internal stress drives it to the standard mechanism of rotation. Without knowing the exact cause, one can only say that it was thrown out after a collision with another object in the native system.

Most of the questions caused the phenomenon of color change. But the analysis showed that there are spots on the surface. So most of the territory is neutral, and the rest is red. This hints at the wide compositional variations, which is unusual for a small object.

It is now known that the strange elongated object previously revolved around another star and survived tragic events. New findings allow us to make a more complete picture of what happened.

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