Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
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On this series, we have reported on dozens of surprising discoveries
on two of our Solar System's most intriguing types of objects:
the comet and the asteroid.
In fact, in recent years,
the line between the two objects has become increasingly blurred,
with some asteroids astonishing astronomers
with their occasional dramatic cometary displays.
And with cometary nuclei more strongly resembling asteroids
than the dirty snowballs of Standard Comet Theory.
Through these reports, we have highlighted the differences
in the theoretical predictions and analyses of the Electric Universe
versus those of standard astronomy.
In this episode, we will explore the discovery of an object
that defies any easy explanation,
the first ever, so called, interstellar asteroid observed from Earth.
Our guest, physicist Eugene Bagashov, explains why today
this object appears to present more questions than answers.
The object I would like to discuss was first discovered
on October 19, 2017, by Pan-STARRS observatory.
At that time it was pretty close to Earth, about 30,000,000 kilometers,
which means closer than Venus at its inferior conjunctions.
A week later, two previous observations of the object were identified
in the Catalina Sky Survey archive, dated October 14 and 17.
The object quickly gained much attention from the astronomical community,
because its velocity that was calculated from the difference
between the observed positions on those dates, was very high, almost 46 km/s.
As the trajectory of its motion was projected backwards in time,
it turned out that the object's perihelion,
when it was at the closest distance to the Sun, happened on September 9,
and at that time the speed should have been around 87 km/s.
Compare this to the speed of Mercury, the fastest planet in the Solar System,
which is about 57 km/s at its perihelion.
It follows from such high velocity that the Sun's gravitation is not strong enough
to keep this object from leaving the system
so it travels alone in a non-periodic hyperbolic trajectory.
When the trajectory was projected even farther backwards,
it turned out that at the edges of the system, well beyond the orbit of Neptune,
the speed should have been around 26 km/s
which is definitely too high for the Sun to keep it in the solar neighbourhood.
Of course, theoretically, the object could have gained the high speed
it was observed with, from a close encounter with Jupiter or Saturn,
but high inclination of its orbit around the Sun
means that such an encouter could never happen.
So it was concluded that the object must come from outside the Solar System
and thus, since that moment, was formally designated as 1I/2017 U1
where I stands for interstellar and the number one
clearly indicates that it is the first known object of that sort.
To commemorate the significance of the occasion, the object also received
the given name "Oumuamua" meaning "Scout" or "Messenger" in Hawaiian.
Obviously, this is quite a big and somewhat problematic discovery
and I wish to discuss the implications that it might have for the Electric Universe agenda
and the Electric Comet hypothesis in particular.
Initially, it was supposed that Oumuamua should be a comet
because of its extremely stretched hyperbolic orbit
but extensive analyses of the images have shown
that it lacks any visible signs of cometary activity, such as comma or tails
which should have already appeared at such close distance to the Sun.
So now it is considered to be an asteroid.
Of course, like in many other similar cases, there are also speculations
made by some people that because of its peculiar trajectory
it might be an artificial object, perhaps made by some alien civilization.
But so far, there is no evidence to support this idea.
The spectrum of the object is quite similar
to the ones that the asteroids in the Solar System have,
and so far there have been no signs of changes in its orbit
which would be caused by some sort of propulsion system.
It is interesting that the direction from which the object
was supposedly entering the Solar System is only about 6° away
from the direction of the motion of the Sun itself
through the local stellar neighborhood, the so-called solar Apex.
Remember that the Sun not only orbits the Galactic center at about 260 km/s
but also, on top of this motion, goes towards the Apex with a speed of about 20 km/s.
So it seems that before the encounter with the Sun,
Oumuamua was moving roughly in the opposite direction
with respect to the surrounding stars, with a velocity of about 6 km/s
so that the addition of these velocities yielded the 26 km/s
that the object supposedly had upon the encounter with the Sun.
Anyway, getting closer to the point,
in my opinion the discovery of this interstellar asteroid
represents a problematic result for the Electric Comet hypothesis.
In particular, I would like to reference my own talk at the EU 2016 conference
where I presented a preliminary analysis of the orbits of comets in the Solar System.
The data available at that time was clearly showing that
all the asteroids in the system have periodic elliptical orbits
and only comets could demonstrate non-periodic parabolic or hyperbolic orbits.
If the cometary activity is caused, for example,
by the release of negative charge accumulated by the body,
when it spent some time at the outskirts of the System,
of course we would expect exactly such picture.
Any object that appears in the inner system only once,
following a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit, would experience such discharge
and the data seem to show this is the case.
But this recent discovery has shown that there is at least one object
that has a hyperbolic orbit and yet does not demonstrate any cometary activity.
The big question that arises is, why is it the case?
Well, being very far from the Sun, Oumuamua should have accumulated
the same negative charge as the other hyperbolic comets do
and should have experienced the same type of discharge as it moved closer to our star.
I should say upfront that I don't have a definite answer to this question.
The best I can provide at this point
is only some additional assumptions and considerations.
For example, we might look at the shape of the object which could be
an important factor contributing to its peculiar response to the solar plasma.
A recent paper in the journal Nature states that Oumuamua has very distinct light curve,
showing strong peaks of brightness, every 7.3 hours,
supposedly due to its rotation.
The modeling shows that the observed picture is consistent with a very dark,
slightly reddish object with an average radius of about 100 meters,
but with very elongated, ellipsoidal shape.
The ratio of its length to its width should be around 10 to 1.
The exact size depends on its refelectivity or albedo
and for example if it's around 4%, which is more or less reasonable,
then Oumuamua's size along 3 axes should be around 800 by 80 by 80 meters.
Another possible explanation for the rapid changes in brightness
is big differences in albedo across the surface,
though the authors state that one does not necessarily exclude the other.
The spectrum of the body actually implies
that the albedo remains roughly constant across the surface,
so highly elongated shape seems to be the most likely explanation
for the variations in brightness.
So one might suppose that the highly elongated shape
tends to somehow inhibit the appearance of cometary features.
At first I thought that it might help to separate charges
that might accumulate at the opposite ends of the object.
But during a discussion with other members of the community,
Nathan Allan suggested that it could lead to the opposite effect,
namely the quick dissipation of charges.
Indeed, as a spiky shape yields much less capacitance than a spherical one,
it might be the case that the charge accumulated by Oumuamua
at the edges of the Solar System, have since then quickly dissipated,
never leading to a pronounced glow or arc mode of discharge.
So continuing this line and venturing even farther into hypothetical areas,
I've had an idea that cometary activity could be more prominent
in spherical bodies and would become suppressed for axial symmetry.
One might imagine a scenario in which
an initially spherical body undergoes a cometary discharge,
which gradually erodes away its material,
slowly reducing its shape from a sphere into such a prolonged cylinder.
It might be a possible explanation for the frequently observed double-lobed objects.
In this case for example, Comet 67P's double lobes
in the coming thousands or millions of years,
should be grinded down to match its thin neck,
in the end resulting in a cigar-shaped body, much like Oumuamua's.
So in this case, it seems there might exist a sort of natural limit
to the possiblity of a comet-like response to the stellar plasmas,
when a comet would, at some point, cease to form a comma and a tail
since its nucleus has already degraded into such an unfavorable cylindrical shape.
The good thing about this hypothesis is that it could be directly falsified
by the observations of the comets that are becoming less and less active.
If the reason for their dimming is simply the lack
of volatiles, as follows from the snowball model,
they would not, on average, tend to be elongated as in the presented case.
At some point, I also suppose that an axially symmetric shape
of Oumuamua might be the sign of some intrinsic magnetization,
where the opposite ends of the cylinder would represent the magnetic poles.
This might explain the lack of cometary activity,
since the magnetic field of the object would shield it from the solar plasma,
making a discharge at least less efficient, if not impossible.
But on the other hand, it is unlikely that this is the case,
as the object demonstrates, more or less uniformly, the reddish color
that is frequent among solar-wind-weathered bodies,
so it should not have sufficient protection from the surrounding plasma.
And if the magnetic field was present,
the magnetic pole areas would be weathered to a larger extent since
they provide a natural pathway for funneling of the charged particles
onto the surface through the magnetic cusps,
the exact same process which causes auroras on Earth to focus around polar areas.
Other factor that might contribute to the lack of observed cometary features
is the relatively small size of the body.
Indeed, in the Electric Comet perspective, the smaller nucleus would also mean lower
capacitance and less possibilities for the accumulation of negative charge.
And out of total 105 comets with defined diameter, at the JPL Small-Body Database,
only 5 objects have a diameter less than 1 kilometer.
The smallest estimate for the diameter of comets existing in this database is 420 meters,
that the Comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu has.
Another possibility is some peculiar surface composition of Oumuamua,
that night make cometary-type-discharge less probable.
This is a line of thought I haven't sufficiently followed
but have to note that so far, the spectrum of the body looks quite trivial,
so perhaps surface properties are not the key to explaining the situation.
One important question that I have so far omitted, is the origins of Oumuamua.
If it indeed comes from some other stellar system,
then we might ask, how and why did it happen?
If the scenario that I've outlined above is correct,
and the shape of the object plays a crucial role,
then one might suppose that Oumuamua once was orbitting some other star
or perhaps a system of two or three stars
in a highly eccentric ellyptical orbit and experiencing a cometary-like discharge
that slowly eroded its surface away,
until it stopped responding to the stellar wind in a cometary manner.
Then, its orbit was perturbed by a planet or some other object
and it was kicked away from the system.
This is at least one possibility.
And as a side note, it would be interesting to see
what implications the Electric Comet hypothesis might provide
in the case of multiple stars in a same system.
In my opinion, this is the area from which
potentially falsifiable predictions might emerge,
especially in the light of Oumuamua's discovery.
It is possible that more bodies of such sort would be discovered in the coming years,
and since binary systems are quite frequent across the Galaxy,
the probability of catching a fragment from such a system is also relatively high.
Now, one might also suppose that Oumuamua was electrically excavated from a rocky planet
as it is supposed in certain EU scenarios for small bodies in the Solar System,
and sent into interstellar space right away.
In this case, the cylindrical shape that is supposedly unfavorable
for the cometary activity would be just a coincidence.
In any event, the "Dirty Snowball" model of comets should settle for something similar
since in this case it requires that Oumuamua was spending a lot of time close to a star
so that the volatiles on its surface would completely evaporate
and the object would never ever show any cometary features.
But then there's also a slight difficulty that in order to lose volatiles effectively,
Oumuamua should have orbited quite close to the star where the gravity is stronger,
which also means that it was not very likely to escape the system later.
Authors of the mentioned paper also note that there's a slight possibility
that Oumuamua is actually native to our Solar System,
but received its high initial velocity after interacting with some, yet undiscovered body.
The direction from which the object was falling into the inner System,
is only about 16° from the Galactic disk
which is an area that many surveys tend to avoid
to reduce background from the Galaxy.
So it is not impossible that there is a body, say,
of the size of Pluto or even bigger, somewhere out there
that could have provided the necessary kinetic energy.
At the same time, one should note that it is a completely different area
with respect to a location of a hypothesized ninth planet,
at the very least it's too high above the eclyptic plane.
So it seems there are still lots of questions about this peculiar discovery
and I hope that the struggle for providing an explanation for these unusual observations,
would help to refine and, at the same time, constrain the Electric Comet hypothesis,
bringing it ever closer to a status of a solid established theory
that is able to make predictions on a regular basis.
I would also like to note that in the coming years, not only the interstellar
but even our local asteroids might provide important clues for further development.
It is especially true in the light of ongoing missions, such as OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2,
both to encounter their targets next summer
and planned missions like Psyche and Lucy to be launched in a few years.
It's a great opportunity to start looking for a type of prediction
that might invalidate the view of these objects as billions of years old
and, at the same time, to answer the crucial question
about the difference between asteroids and comets,
that is of such big importance for the Electric Comet hypothesis.
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