Text/Reporter Zhang Ting
The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object discovered to visit the solar system. Since it was observed in 2017, a number of weird properties of the star have attracted the attention of scientists, including its unusual acceleration as it moves away from the sun.
Scientists have discovered that the phenomenon that the Omega is moving away from the sun at an increasing speed cannot be explained according to the conventional gravity theory. Given the unexpected behavior of Auria, scientists have put forward various hypotheses, including that it could be an alien spacecraft.
Reuters reported a few days ago that a new study provides a clearer explanation for the accelerating behavior of the star, which is caused by the release of hydrogen gas as it heats up under sunlight.
Scientists initially thought that Auria was an extrasolar comet. But later observations revealed that it lacked the tail of gas and dust that characterizes many comets. It used to be described as cigar-shaped, but is now thought to resemble a rock pancake. It is smaller than originally estimated and has now been determined to be about 375 feet (114 meters) long, 365 feet (111 meters) wide and about 60 feet (18 meters) thick.
After being flung out of the solar system, the star’s chemical composition changed as it was bombarded with high-energy radiation as it traveled through interstellar space, causing some of its own ice to turn into hydrogen, which was trapped in the rest, scientists say in ice.
An artistic rendering of “Ouputra” released by the European Southern Observatory in 2017. (M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory/AFP)As it passed through the inner solar system (including the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), it was heated, causing its ice structure to rearrange and release trapped hydrogen, which brought A little impact. In the process of releasing hydrogen gas, no comet tail will form.
“The key finding is that Omega probably started out as a small, water-rich icy body roughly similar to solar system comets,” said Jenny Bergner, an astrochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. The model can explain the strange behavior of Aurora without resorting to any fancy physics or chemistry.”
Bergner is the lead author of the study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature.
Auria was first discovered by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS (Pan-STARRS1) telescope. Its name means “messenger from afar” in the Native Hawaiian language.
“We don’t know where it originated, but it may have traveled in interstellar space for less than 100 million years. Its color is reddish, consistent with the color of many small bodies in the solar system. It is currently leaving the solar system, passing Neptune on the way. said Bergner.
The Hubble Space Telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) photographed the second exoplanet to visit the solar system in 2019, namely the “2I/Borisov” (2I/Borisov) comet. The object looks and behaves more like a typical comet than does Auriu. Its pictures reveal the dust surrounding the comet’s nucleus.
The new astronomical observatory, now under construction in Chile, is scheduled to start operating in 2024 and may discover one or two interstellar objects in the solar system each year, the researchers said. ◇