Interstellar objects

When a comet or an asteroid gets very close to the sun, it can happen that solar gravity gives it a push that makes it gain speed and shoot out of the solar system, thus becoming an interstellar object whose origin is the solar system Claro this.

Astronomers see several cases of these a year and the same thing that the sun does happens with the rest of the stars, so there are from small rocks to entire planets that are expelled from their birth system and are wandering through the space between the stars, some of them end up visiting us, passing by, being able to even get trapped in our solar system due to the gravity of a planet or they can even impact with the Earth.

The history of the hunt for interstellar objects has an initial moment, a golden moment, in 2017 when the interstellar object called Oumuamua was located, this object is not very large, it is about 230 meters long but only 35 meters wide, it was supposes that it came from beyond the solar system because of the speed at which it arrived, for the sun or a planet to capture an object it needs that object travel at an adequate speed, if it goes very slowly the gravity of the sun can end up attracting it or if It goes very fast, what would happen is that this object would pass by and that is what is happening with Oumuamua, which is currently moving away from the sun rapidly, although it will still take many years to leave the solar system.

With Oumuamua, astronomers thought at first that it was a comet, but curiously it did not show the characteristic tail of comets, so they deduced that it must be a dry object, without ice, the tail of comets is formed when the ice of the Comet it is vaporized by the heat of the Sun and that gas ending the tail, in this case it did not happen, no tail was seen.

So they thought it was a rock and maybe a rock with a lot of metals or even a basically metallic object, because normally very elongated asteroids like this case are identified with metallic asteroids astronomers know this because to maintain the elongated shape they have to be objects very solid and resistant, if it were a rocky object or made up of piles of rocks it would end up breaking after a while with the turns it gives, so astronomers thought it was a fairly dry metallic object, but when it began to move away from the sun , it began to do something strange, it accelerated, it is not that it accelerated, but it was an acceleration that could not be explained with a trajectory dominated by the forces of gravity, there was something even small that was driving it.

The theory most widely accepted by astronomers is that Oumuamua had some ice and gas trapped in its rocks and metals and that as it got closer to the sun it warmed up and that when it reached the point of closest approach and highest temperature, that trapped gas ended up coming out, pushing the asteroid. at the time it was moving away from the sun, it would be an effect similar to air coming out of a balloon.

One of the latest works along these lines was published in March of this year in 2023 by Jennifer Bergner, an expert in astrochemistry at the University of Berkeley.

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