Education

On October 19, 2017, the Pan-STARRS telescope spotted a mysterious voyager (from the interstellar space) that was sailing through our Solar System like a shark cruising through a vast ocean at incredible speed. I was ecstatic upon hearing this exciting discovery. I said to myself: “I’ve got to share this exciting news with my friends.” But my enthusiasm was dampened when I realized I couldn’t pronounce the name of this damned thing: ‘Oumuamua. It turned out this name is Hawaiian, meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first.”  Here is your guide to its pronunciation I got from my friend, Dr. Funky Genius: Imagine you are super creative – calling a cow “mooer.” And you are writing a poem about this lovely cow, and there you have it: ‘Oh mooer mooer.’

‘Oumuamua is the first known voyager from another star to visit our solar system. Astronomers have been debating what the heck this voyager actually is. Is it an asteroid – a small rocky body, or a comet that we may call a dirty snowball? A new study by astrophysicists Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb has raised an intriguing question or speculation: Could ‘Oumuamua be actually an alien spaceship?  Here are the three unusual things about Oumuamua.

1. ‘Oumuamua has a weird shape. It’s highly elongated and narrow, about 400 meters (or a quarter of a mile) long, but perhaps as little as 40 meters wide. Its shape is like a shark body, which is unlike any known asteroids and comets in our solar system – they are typically round or semi-round. A shark-like architecture is well suited to interstellar travel because this would minimize friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust, just like the fastest shark with a streamlined body and shape that minimizes drag from the water as it cruises through the water).

2. ‘Oumuamua has a bizarre trajectory. Planets, asteroids, and comets in the solar system orbit the Sun in ellipses or elongated circles, as predicted by Newton’s law of gravity. Earth goes around the Sun in an elliptical orbit once every year. (People often say living on Earth nowadays is expensive. But keep in mind each year you get a free round trip around the Sun (in a fancy oval-shaped orbit). ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory is completely different and appears highly hyperbolic. It was moving too fast to be gravitationally captured by the Sun. In other words, Oumuamua was passing through our solar system but not orbiting the Sun.

3. ‘Oumuamua was accelerating as it was moving away from the Sun, which can’t be explained by Newton’s law of gravity. More, the voyager was also tumbling on its way out, like performing spectacular somersaults in deep space. This odd behavior, along with its weird shape and trajectory, led to an exotic scenario: Oumuamua could be a fully operational spaceship sent out by an alien civilization.

In conclusion: A homeless guy asks his friend, “What do you think the odds are that I will become a billionaire?” Friend answers: “Maybe a trillion to one.” The guy responds: “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”