Mysterious Things Discovered In Space: Oumuamua
Asteroid Oumuamua is the first interstellar object discovered in the Solar system. In the Hawaiian language, this name means “messenger from afar, who arrived first”. At first it was considered as a comet, but then, due to the lack of cometary activity, it was reclassified as an asteroid. But how it formed and acquired such a strange cigar-shaped shape was still unclear.
Discovered on October 19, 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system in Hawaii, it was completely unlike anything in our Solar system. Its dry surface, unusually elongated shape and mysterious nature of movement even led some scientists to assume that it is an alien probe.
Scientists Yun Zhang from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Douglas N. C. Lin from the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a computer model that explains not only all the features of the mysterious asteroid, but also the mechanism of its formation. The authors believe that Oumuamua is a fragment of a planetary body that passed too close to the host star and was torn apart by tidal forces.
To explain the specific features of the asteroid, scientists used a modern model to simulate the tidal destruction of a parent body orbiting near its star. The simulation results showed that if a planetary body is within a few hundred thousand kilometers of a star, it is distorted and then destroyed by stellar streams, breaking up into very elongated fragments with sufficient kinetic energy to escape from its planetary system.
The authors suggest that the “progenitor” of Oumuamua was a planetesimal about one kilometer in size, or a small rocky planet orbiting a low-mass star or white dwarf. According to them, in the interstellar medium must be very many objects similar to Oumuamua.
“The discovery of Oumuamua implies that the population of stony interstellar objects is much larger than we previously thought”, – says Zhang. “On average, each planetary system should throw out a total of about a hundred trillion such objects. This should be a very common scenario for creating objects of this type”.
