Oumuamua continues to perplex astronomers a year after it vanished | Hacker News Reader

Oumuamua continues to perplex astronomers a year after it vanished

businessinsider.com

38 pointsglassworm14 comments

I really recommend this Ars Technica podcast that features a long and in-depth interview with Avi Loeb:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/nailing-down-the-nat...

He makes a pretty convincing case that there are several highly unusual properties of Oumaumau that makes it reasonable to hypothesize that it is of unnatural origin. Whether or not you're convinced, you'll at least come away much better informed about his arguments that from the soundbite back-and-forth that passes for debate in articles like the BI one.

And I really recommend this PBS Space Time Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wICOlaQOpM0

He makes excellent points that given historical data, a mm thin solar sail really shouldn't be our first conclusion instead of a collection of rocks that broke apart and refused back together (think of a combination of Shoemaker-Levy and Ultima Thule).

And given the short length of time we've been observing space, chances of one of the first things we see enter our solar system be a tumbling, solar sail would mean that interstellar space is chock full of wildly tumbling solar sails! We need to take base rates for probability into account and realize that since most of the stuff we've seen in space is just rocks and most of our models predict just rocks in interstellar space, the probability of it being anything other than just a rock is very low.

This whole media obsession with Avi Loeb definitely feels like an example of news organization paying too much attention to the institution an academic works at and not how the rest of their field thinks about their ideas.

For those without javascript and wishing to download the interview directly in mp3 form, here's the URL:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/force-cdn/highwinds/aftero...

Avi Leob is THE person.

You might find also interesting his interview on Rob Reid's podcast: https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/040

I believe that is the same audio in the linked article. They said it’s an Ars podcast but it’s After On.

If he wants to make any progress understanding Oumuamua, he will need to talk to a plasma physicist. Then he will need to stop talking about it, because there is no more reliable way to get ostracized in astronomy than to start talking about that.

Perhaps a dumb question but...

"The mysterious object flew within about 15 million miles of our planet on October 14.

But it wasn't until four days later that humanity finally spotted it in telescope data."

How do we know any of this if we didn't see it until later? Or are we just reverse extrapolating it's orbital path from what we saw later?

In general, most laws of physics are reversible, so extrapolation backwards is as accurate as extrapolation forwards. In the case where it's just mostly motion and gravity, we can do it rather accurately.

I know that, but that makes the assumption that the flight path was unaffected by external forces. How is this distinguishable from, say, an alien spacecraft seeing it was spotted, boomeranging around the Sun, and exiting the solar system?

*Wow, sorry. Guess I'm a conspiracy nutjob for skiing an innocent question.

Theoretically we can't distinguish them. But then again, if CCTV shows a hooded guy exiting your shop's front door at 4 am, it would be safe to assume that the same guy entered the shop some time before that, even though theoretically it could be an alien lifeform teleported into your shop out of thin air.

It's never aliens. (Until we actually find them, of course.)

Seems more akin to saying, since we see this runner on the track, he must have been running around the track for an undeterminable period of the past time. It's just as possible that the runner just started running when you saw him.

All I wanted to know is if we observed the past path or inferred it. Seems a valid question to me, but whatever.

I think what they're saying is that we saw the flyby but it was in data from a few days ago.

I would really only be concerned if we see two more of them, because they come in threes.

Meh. This is tripe for a slow news day.

  1. OH NO! SUNLIGHT OFFGASSING!

  2. OH NO! CIGAR SHAPED!

  3. OH NO! TOO FAST AND WE MISSED IT!

  4. OH NO! UNANNOUNCED ARRIVAL!

  5. OH NO! THE MATH IS HARD! I CAN’T TELL IF IT ALL ADDS UP!

Taken together, none of these things are confusing or cause for concern, until you introduce the joirnalistic willingness to ask questions like “Do you believe in ghosts???”

Take an event with large gaps of direct knowlege, inject speculative anxiety cutouts tat fit neatly inside the huge gaping holes of the narrative, and selectively avoid alternative theories that could supply a less emotionally charged conclusion.

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