{"id":205491,"date":"2021-03-18T19:28:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T16:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/interstellar-object-is-cookie-shaped-planet-shard\/"},"modified":"2021-03-18T19:28:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T16:28:41","slug":"interstellar-object-is-cookie-shaped-planet-shard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/interstellar-object-is-cookie-shaped-planet-shard\/","title":{"rendered":"#Interstellar object is cookie-shaped planet shard"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Interstellar object is cookie-shaped planet shard<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Our solar system\u2019s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.<\/p>\n

Arizona State University astronomers reported this week that the strange 148-foot (45-meter) object that app<\/a>ears to be made of frozen nitrogen, just like the surface of Pluto and Neptune\u2019s largest moon Triton.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors, Alan Jackson and Steven Desch, think an impact knocked a chunk off an icy nitrogen-covered planet 500 million years ago and sent the piece tumbling out of its own star system, toward ours. The reddish remnant is believed to be a sliver of its original self, its outer layers evaporated by cosmic radiation and, more recently, the sun.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s named Oumuamua, Hawaiian for scout, in honor of the observatory in Hawaii that discovered it in 2017.<\/p>\n

Visible only as a pinpoint of light millions of miles away at its closest approach, it was determined to have originated beyond our solar system because its speed and path suggested it wasn\u2019t orbiting the sun or anything else.<\/p>\n

The only other object confirmed to have strayed from another star system into our own is the comet 21\/Borisov, discovered in 2019.<\/p>\n

\"Combined
Combined telescope image of the first interstellar object `Oumuamua, circled in blue as an unresolved point source at the center.<\/figcaption>
ESO\/K. Meech et al.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But what is Oumuamua? It didn\u2019t fit into known categories \u2014 it looked like an asteroid but sped along like a comet. Unlike a comet, though, it didn\u2019t have a visible tail. Speculation flipped back and forth between comet and asteroid \u2014 and it was even suggested it could be an alien artifact.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody is interested in aliens and it was inevitable that this first object outside the solar system would make people think of aliens,\u201d Desch said in a statement. \u201cBut it\u2019s important in science<\/a> not to jump to conclusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using its shininess, size and shape \u2014 and that it was propelled by escaping substances that didn\u2019t produce a visible tail \u2014 Jackson and Desch devised computer models that helped them determine Oumuamua was most likely a chunk of nitrogen ice being gradually eroded, the way a bar of soap thins with use.<\/p>\n

Their two papers were published Tuesday by the American Geophysical Union and also presented at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, typically held in Houston but virtual this year.<\/p>\n

Not all scientists buy the new explanation. Harvard University\u2019s Avi Loeb disputes the findings and stands by his premise that the object appears to be more artificial than natural \u2014 in other words, something from an alien civilization, perhaps a light sail. His newly published book \u201cExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,\u201d addresses the subject.<\/p>\n

Given that Oumuamua is unlike comets and asteroids \u2014 and something not seen before \u2014 \u201cwe cannot assume \u2018business as usual,\u2019 as many scientists argue,\u201d Loeb wrote in an email Wednesday. \u201cIf we contemplate \u2018something that we had not seen before,\u2019 we must leave the artificial origin hypothesis on the table and collect more evidence on objects from the same class.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Oumuamua was at its closest approach to Earth, it appeared to have a width six times larger than its thickness. Those are the rough proportions of one wafer of an Oreo cookie, Desch noted.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now long gone, beyond the orbit of Uranus, more than 2 billion miles (3.2 billion kilometers) away \u2014 and far too small to be seen, even by the Hubble Space Telescope. As a result, astronomers will need to rely on the original observations and, hopefully, continue to refine their analyses, Jackson said.<\/p>\n

By the time the object starts leaving our solar system around 2040, the width-to-thickness ratio will have dropped to 10-to-1, according to Desch.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo maybe Oumuamua was consistent with a cookie when we saw it, but will soon be literally as flat as a pancake,\u201d Desch said in an email.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the way the cosmic cookie \u2014 this one anyway \u2014 crumbles.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Interstellar object is cookie-shaped planet shard” CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Our solar system\u2019s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie. Arizona State University…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":205492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/Interstellar-Visitor.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[98277,5017,61514,67907,5019],"class_list":["post-205491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-3-18-21","tag-astronomy","tag-research","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}