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'Oumuamua: Interstellar Object: Rendezvous With Rama?

AlchoPwn said:
There is every chance that there have been similar objects that have gone undetected passing through our solar system in the past. The shape is somewhat unusual, as items of reasonable size and gravity will generally become more bulbous as they accrue matter over time. As to the velocity, I can't see what would be odd about it, as mass in a vacuum can go very fast indeed.
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Not only that, but Oumuamua is now going faster after having executed a perfect sling-shot manoeuvre as it passed the Sun.
Spookily just as a spacecraft would do.
 
The weird thing about 'Oumuamua's velocity is not that it is fast; in fact it is very slow compared to the LSR, the 'Local Standard of Rest' which is the average speed of rotation around the Galaxy at this distance. That makes it very difficult to find out where it came from. It is travelling at the same speed as all the other stars, if you average out their proper motions. The Solar System itself is travelling quite a bit faster than the LSR, because it is moving at an oblique angle.
 
eburacum said:
The unusual shape and velocity of the object are both significant, but more telling is the fact that it appears statistically unlikely.
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Indeed, this is very intriguing (if correct). Frustratingly, we seem to know so little about both our own solar system and about other solar systems, we aren't yet even sure about what is or is not "normal".

Whatever is or is not "normal", I am sure that Oumuamua is worth sending a catch up mission to, while there is still time.
 
eburacum said:
The unusual shape and velocity of the object are both significant, but more telling is the fact that it appears statistically unlikely.
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This is the weakest part of the argument. It's unlikely, but with a sample size of '1', by itself it's meaningless.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Spookily just as a spacecraft would do.
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just as a spacecraft that we have recently theorised would do

the most interesting aspect for me is how it seems to accord with some of our most recent technological ideas ... i mean, given the time and distance its been out there, is that not a massive coincidence ?
 
henry said:
just as a spacecraft that we have recently theorised would do
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Not that recent. The principle was established by flying Apollo spacecraft round the Moon and back to Earth.
It's only a bit of logic to reason that a bigger effect could be produced by a slingshot manoeuvre round the Sun.
 
Could 'Oumuamua be an extraterrestrial solar sail?


As a Solar sail would likely be many miles in diameter it is highly unlikely.

Also the idea s ithat Solar wind pushes the sail along. So a tumbling sail will not be very efficient.
One problem with Solar sails is that they are one directional. They need a star behind them to do the pushing.
When you get to the end of your journey, how do you slow down ?

Maybe have the sail pushed from the other side by the star in your target galaxy.
But you will take as long to slow down as you did to accelerate away from home. Longer if the target star is smaller than the one that was pushing you out.

But as for big rocks in space generally.

Remember the one that exploded over Russia a short while ago.

No one saw it coming.

INT21.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Not that recent. The principle was established by flying Apollo spacecraft round the Moon and back to Earth.
It's only a bit of logic to reason that a bigger effect could be produced by a slingshot manoeuvre round the Sun.
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... plus the light sail theory ?
 
henry said:
just as a spacecraft that we have recently theorised would do

the most interesting aspect for me is how it seems to accord with some of our most recent technological ideas ... i mean, given the time and distance its been out there, is that not a massive coincidence ?
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Might you be theorising that it was sent by someone/something to test our reactions to it? :)

This could be like some UFO sightings, possibly.
 
...Might you be theorising that it was sent by someone/something to test our reactions to it? :) ..

This would imply that it came from somewhere very close by.

As a technological race we have only been around for about 300 year. Not long enough to draw the attention of some race light years away.

INT21.
 
INT21 said:
...Might you be theorising that it was sent by someone/something to test our reactions to it? :) ..

This would imply that it came from somewhere very close by.
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Not necessarily. That would, in turn, imply that it was sent by someone/something with a technological development only slightly more advanced than our own.

It seems to me that, in the unlikely event it was an experiment on the white mice (us I mean!), that whoever/whatever sent it could be way, way more advanced than we are. They could have assembled it just outside of our range of vision and accelerated it to the desire speed quickly, they could have... well, the possibilities are endless.
 
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markrkingston1 said:
Might you be theorising that it was sent by someone/something to test our reactions to it?
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if this visit is an extremely rare occurrence, and given the expanses of time/distance involved, is it not then uncanny that it coincides to within a few years of the invention/proposal of the relevant technology ... or is that a case of logical induction, we are overlaying our most recent discoveries on this case and making them fit, as science tends to do

i was actually considering it was somehow sent by us, but by some circuitous route and method we may come up with in the future
 
henry said:
if this visit is an extremely rare occurrence, and given the expanses of time/distance involved, is it not then uncanny that it coincides to within a few years of the invention/proposal of the relevant technology ... or is that a case of logical induction, we are overlaying our most recent discoveries on this case and making them fit, as science tends to do

i was actually considering it was somehow sent by us, but by some circuitous route and method we may come up with in the future
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Yes, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that UFOs are our technology, from the future.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Not only that, but Oumuamua is now going faster after having executed a perfect sling-shot manoeuvre as it passed the Sun.
Spookily just as a spacecraft would do.
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This is less impressive than it sounds. To qualify as a 'slingshot manoeuvre', a spacecraft needs to actively accelerate while passing near a planet or star. This invokes the Oberth Effect, and multiplies the effect of the acceleration by a certain amount (dependent on the distance to closest approach). By a curious coinicidence this is what happens to all comets when they approach the Sun, since they start to outgas in that location, so every comet exhibits a small slingshot effect at perihelion.
 
Hmm; on second thoughts maybe there is something suspicious about the flightpath of this object. Even an unpowered close approach can qualify as a slingshot move, if it changes the orbital path significantly and usefully. Coming in on a hyperbolic orbit, 'Oumuamua approached close enough to the Sun to change its trajectory significantly, even without considering the effects of the outgassing. There are fairly long odds against this happening as well.

Perhaps I'm looking at this wrong. We saw 'Oumuamua precisely because it went near the Sun. If it had been further out we wouldn't have noticed it.
 
henry said:
if this visit is an extremely rare occurrence, and given the expanses of time/distance involved, is it not then uncanny that it coincides to within a few years of the invention/proposal of the relevant technology ... or is that a case of logical induction, we are overlaying our most recent discoveries on this case and making them fit, as science tends to do
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I can only agree. We (well, human scientific understanding) does not yet know enough to really know how uncanny (or not) this was. But it certainly has the smell of uncanniness.

henry said:
i was actually considering it was somehow sent by us, but by some circuitous route and method we may come up with in the future
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An interesting thought!
 
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New Yorker article:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-...pJobID=1561324177&spReportId=MTU2MTMyNDE3NwS2

Your explanation of why ‘Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?

There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua.

There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.
 
uair01 said:
only one in five hundred stars ... that star would have to be very special.
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i dig reading about this thing, its like the ultimate uffo (thats you eff freakin oh) ... but am i wrong or does the above not make much sense ... 1 in 500, its not that radical ?
 
..When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, ..

I'm a bit puzzled by 'vicinity of the Sun'. Which stars are you thinking of ?

INT21.
 
INT21 said:
..When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, ..

I'm a bit puzzled by 'vicinity of the Sun'. Which stars are you thinking of ?

INT21.
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Depends on what is meant by 'vicinity'.
 
Non of them particularly near.
 
Alpha Centauri

The two main stars are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which form a binary pair. They are an average of 4.3 light-years from Earth. The third star is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.22 light-years from Earth and is the closest star other than the sun.

Not 'just down the road', are they ?
 
on what scale, this guys scale is different to ours ... we can enumerate the 500 nearest stars, or hopefully someone can
 
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