![]() Also confusing: When Oumuamua was closest to the sun, it didn’t break apart like a comet would amid the heat and display a telltale tail. However, astronomers saw no visible evidence of these jets. Like a comet, it may have been expelling debris and gases from its surface that would be enough to propel it along like rocket fuel burning off the end of a spacecraft. ![]() There could be a very simple explanation for Oumuamua’s acceleration. NASA JPL Oumuamua is a very mysterious, fascinating object When the Hubble Space Telescope spotted Oumuamua in the beginning of January 2018, it was some 25,000 miles ahead of its expected trajectory (see the GIF below), as a paper by Micheli and co-authors in Nature explains. ![]() “There was something affecting its motion other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and planets,” Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency, which was tracking the object, said in a June pr ess statement. After slingshotting around the sun with enough speed to overcome the grasp of its gravity, it did something a bit unexpected: It sped up, propelled by some inexplicable force. In 2018, the mystery of Oumuamua deepened further. And they still don’t know whether it was truly an asteroid, or something more closely resembling a comet. Since the rock was the first interstellar object ever spotted in our solar system, the scientists called it Oumuamua - a Hawaiian word meaning either “scout” or “messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to us.” But they had no idea where it came from. For reference, Voyager 1, the spacecraft that’s currently leaving our solar system, is traveling at around 35,000 mph. But unlike the millions of known asteroids in our solar system, this one was traveling so fast - more than 70,000 miles per hour - that it couldn’t be captured by our sun’s gravity, the scientists reasoned. The astronomers thought it might be an asteroid. In October 2017, astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Maui found a bizarre cigar-shaped rock blazing its way through our solar system.
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