Scientists insist strange path changing Interstellar Object Oumuamua is "NOT ALIENS"
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https://planetplanet.net/2019/07/01/oumuamua-was-it-aliens-spoiler-no/
‘Oumuamua: was it aliens? (spoiler: no)
Imagine this. You’re drinking your morning coffee. A small blob zooms at top speed through the kitchen, into the hall and out an open window. You only catch a quick fuzzy glimpse before it’s gone.
What was that thing?
What’s your first guess? A neighborhood cat? A squirrel? Maybe something more exotic like a raccoon or a fox?
Or was it … an alien?
A parallel story has been playing out in astronomy.
Something zoomed past the Earth in October 2017. Astronomers scrambled to observe the object but within about a week it was too faint for almost all of our telescopes.
It was so small that we couldn’t see its shape. The only thing we knew right away is that the object was moving so fast that it must have came from outside the Solar System. It was named ‘Oumuamua.
Some scientists proposed that ‘Oumuamua was an asteroid kicked out of its home planetary system. Others (like me) thought it was more likely to be comet-like. Some suggested it could have been ejected from a dying star or be a remnant of a planet that was shredded to pieces.
Then two scientists from Harvard claimed it was an alien spacecraft and the media of the world went bonkers.
Over the past year I’ve had the great pleasure to be a part of a group of scientists thinking about ‘Oumuamua, sponsored by the International Space Science Institute.
Our team includes the discoverers of ‘Oumuamua, scientists who specialize in detecting and modeling the evolution of asteroids, comets and outer Solar System objects, and experts in how stars and planets form (like me).
Our first team meeting took place shortly after those two astronomers cried “alien”! (In astronomy-land this is like the boy calling “wolf”.)
Our team’s first order of business quickly became, as best we could, to un-ring the alien bell.
To quote Carl Sagan (and precursors Laplace and Hume), Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The claim that ‘Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft is as extraordinary as it gets. But it is lacking in extraordinary evidence, or really, in any compelling evidene at all.
In this post I will discuss how all of ‘Oumuamua’s characteristics can be explained without aliens. There is still plenty of debate; we aren’t sure whether it was a squirrel or a cat that ran through the house. But there is no reason to think that it was aliens.
There are five pieces of “evidence” used to claim that ‘Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft.
None stands up to even the gentlest scrutiny.
Let’s go through them one at a time.
There are too few natural objects in interstellar space: ‘Oumuamua should never have been discovered. It must have been aimed at Earth deliberately.
This argument relies on knowing – by other means than simply looking – how many natural objects are out there. And that relies on knowing where they came from.
Planetary systems are the most obvious source of interstellar objects. Planet formation is messy, and leftover building blocks are commonly tossed out of their systems.
We know quite a bit about planets around other stars and how planets form
How many objects depends on their sizes, which we don’t know. It could be a few big ones or a zillion small ones.
Let’s imagine that interstellar objects have the same distribution of sizes as our asteroids. In that case the big objects dominate and it is indeed very unlikely that we would have detected ‘Oumuamua.
So interstellar objects probably don’t have the same size distribution as the asteroids.
This is interesting! It may be telling us about the growth of the building blocks of exoplanets, or the processes that shape these objects.
But not evidence for aliens.
‘Oumuamua entered our Solar System on a very unlikely orbit, which came closer to Earth than to any other planet. It must have been aimed toward Earth by intelligent aliens.
Objects from interstellar space enter and leave the Solar System all the time. Studies find that, indeed, ‘Oumuamua is on an unusual orbit when compared with the typical trajectory of an object entering the Solar System.
But which interstellar bjects can we actually find? These objects are faint and we can only detect those that come close to Earth.
It turns out that ‘Oumuamua’s orbit is completely average when compared with detectable interstellar objects. The ones we could find are mostly on “special” orbits.
The odds of running into a Japanese person in Paris are pretty low. They are in a small minority. But they are no longer a small minority if you are at the airport, by the gate for a flight to Tokyo. It all depends on the context.
In the right context, ‘Oumuamua’s orbit is nothing special. No need for aliens.