it's been long thought that there are objects out in space moving around between stars and sometimes they can pass through our solar system and not long ago something from deep space made a surprise visit some say this visitor was a comet or maybe an asteroid but another astronomer strongly believes it's something completely different was it the splinted remains of an exoplanet or was this interstellar visitor some kind of alien spacecraft in disguise and why do some believe this on October 19 2017 the very The first known interstellar object to enter our solar system was detected by astronomers using the pan stars observatory in Maui Hawaii a big telescope equipped with one of the world's largest digital cameras with almost 1.4billion pixels what they saw was a small point of light flashing through our solar system like a beacon from a lighthouse not typical of an asteroid or a comet in fact it was something no one had ever seen before astronomers named it amumua which means a messenger from afar arriving first and at the time they believed it was some kind of elongated cigar-shaped object tumbling through space because of the way it changed brightness it was estimated to be bigger than the Eiffel tower some 1 312 feet long and 130 feet thick it wasn't discovered until it was on its way out of our solar system 40 days after passing the the closest point to the sun on September the 9th 2017 and it was moving incredibly fast about 196 000 miles per hour and the way it was whipping around the sun told scientists that this object had to have come from somewhere beyond our solar system the object flew past the earth so fast that its speed couldn't be from the gravity of the sun alone in fact the sun had nearly no influence on this unknown object as it hurtled through our solar system the strange thing about a Muammar is it's not an asteroid and it doesn't look anything like your ordinary comet however it behaves like a comet comets are small icy bodies that develop tails made of volatile materials seen vaporizing off the comet's body from the the heat of the sun it just so happens that the second interstellar object discovered in our region of space in 2019 comet 2i Borisov behaved and acted like a normal comet did and this made her Muammar look even stranger astronomers were unable to explain amumu's movements through space by the force of gravity alone, some researchers believed that a Muammar was jetting outgas from the sunlit side, that would push the object like a rocket however the The problem with this is there was no detectable escaping gas no tail like you would see from a typical comet not only that the push seen from a muammua was stronger than what scientists would have expected to see from any other ordinary comet and it was a continuous push if cometary outgassing is ruled out and then inferred excess force is real then only one possibility remains and we'll get to that in a moment the way in which the object accelerated had many believing it was an alien spacecraft perhaps some kind of extraterrestrial probe powered by some internal power source the other strange thing is that no one had a clue to what solar system it came from or how old the interstellar the visitor is because it was traveling so fast that no telescope could grab a decent enough image to give us an idea of what it really looked like or what it was made out of this greatly added to the mystery some researchers have come to exotic conclusions to what this first interstellar visitor could have been and where it might have come from a Harvard professor of astronomy by the name of available said that umuamua is indeed an alien spacecraft that is powered by a light sail the method of propelling a spacecraft using radiation pressure given off by the sun or huge mirrors the only way to make sense of a moon is strange acceleration without resorting to some sort of undetectable outgassing is to assume that the object was propelled by solar radiation by photons bouncing off it's surface and the only way the object could be propelled by solar radiation is if it were no thicker than a millimeter and have a very low density with a the large surface area this object could function as a sail-powered by light rather than by wind, such an object could be produced by nature leaving the only other the explanation that um must have been designed built and launched by an extraterrestrial intelligence he further explained that the non-gravitational acceleration is a sign of deliberate maneuvering and a muammua has no comet tail showing any outgassing there's no way of proving or disproving this theory and a claim like this one from an experienced and well-respected astronomer is very unusual but another theory has now surfaced that might explain what a muammar really is it's now believed the object could be like a pancake or a giant cookie shaped piece of debris a piece of shrapnel from an exoplanet like pluto in 2021 two arizona state researchers published a pair of papers arguing that the object could be a hydrogen iceberg these researchers think that some space object hit the planet where muammar originated from and the violent the collision sent the chunk of planet careering towards our solar system around 400 to 500 million years ago at the beginning of discovery researchers thought it might be a long thin cigar-shaped object tumbling end over end and something unknown appeared to be making a muammar move faster as if something was pushing on it but now researchers think they understand this strange visitor and it is neither an asteroid nor a comet no one is certain what a muammar is made of so scientists calculated the different kinds of ice that would change from solid togas at a rate that accounted for a muammur's rocket effect and concluded that the object must be made of nitrogen ice the same stuff you'd find on the the surface of pluto or Neptune's moon triton and here's a big surprise our first interstellar visitor actually entered the solar system way back in 1995 as it got closer to our solar system and therefore the sun the chunk of the planet started losing layers of frozen nitrogen by the time we discovered it the object had already lost 95 percent of its mass melting into the small chunk that was detected so maybe after all it isn't some type of alien technology but the idea of a piece of an exoplanet flying through our solar system is still exciting if not downright scary depending on where it's headed [Music] right now the object is leaving our solar system and we'll leave our solar system and enter interstellar space in the late 2030s never to return again but there is something called project Lyra which develops concepts for reaching interstellar objects like a Muammar the goal of the project is to see if it's possible to send tiny spacecraft to intercept and study interstellar objects but the the challenge to catch a murmur is formidable this is because it's moving at 5.5 astronomical units per year that's 465 million miles and it will be beyond saturn's orbit very soon this is much faster than anything we've ever sent into space and the challenge of sending a spacecraft to catch a Muammar pushes the current envelope of space exploration to the limit despite this a mission is possible and a tiny light sail spacecraft could be launched in 2030 to 2033 and reach a Muammar by 2047 and 2049. we've already built the lightsail 2 spacecraft which has a sail the size of a boxing ring made from a sheet of mylar this same kind of solar technology could be used to send tiny probes quickly through space just by bouncing a high-powered laser off their tiny sails and perhaps one that could catch a muamua and finally tell us exactly what it is what do you think a Muammar is is it a defunct piece of alien technology let us know in the comments and make sure you stay tuned here for updates on everything space-related thanks for reading. Source: YOUTUBE.COM
Posts
0 Comments