I'd argue it would be pretty uninteresting to follow Oumuamua where it's going. It was traveling at 0.001% c and the nearest star is 4 light years away, so even if it was aimed directly at that star system, it would take 400,000 years to get there. Oumuamua is going to spend a LONG time cruising in the darkness.
Preliminary orbital calculations suggest that the object came from the approximate direction of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. However, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the journey-even at the speed of about 59,000 miles per hour (26.4 kilometers per second)-that Vega was not near that position when the ‘Oumuamua was there about 300,000 years ago.
Unlikely that we will ever know for this specific object, but hopefully we will be more poised for future study ;)
Oumuamua is moving way too fast for anything to catch up to it anytime soon. If I remember correctly it's moving about as fast as New Horizons in the 23km/s speed range. You would need lots of years to catch up to it!
I believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint.
But I don't believe in interstellar travel at all. I don't think people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale, this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be another 200 kilometers/124 miles away. Here's a great video to illustrate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk
IMO Oumuamua was a rock.
However, it's fun to think about it being alien, and it's remarkably similar to Arthur Clarke's Rama story.
Presumably the speed and trajectory of Oumuamua is known? Has this been traced back to give a potential origin if it is fro another star system?
"Two of NASA's space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) tracked the object traveling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun. Its outbound path is about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun." https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/co...
If the distance to the nearest star is 40,208,000,000,000 then:
40,208,000,000,000 / 38 (km per second) / 3600 seconds per hour / 24 hours per day 365 days per year = 33552 years if it had come from closest star
Do I have those numbers right? Maths isn't a strength.
‘Oumuamua's incoming and outgoing speed is ~5AU/year. In 10,000 years that's 50,000AU, which is approximately the distance to the outer most region of the Oort Cloud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
Interestingly enough, it is traveling very slowly with regards to the average motion of all the local stars. You could look at it as just sitting there in the void, slowly drifting until our system zoomed on by and flung it off in a new direction in its wake.
It's doing ~40km/s almost directly away from us. We could launch yesterday and still never catch up. Best we could have done would be a flyby as it passed beneath the ecliptic - not nothing, to be sure, but not nearly close enough for sample return, either.
Regarding Omouamoua, we just observed for the first time in human history, a cylinder or plate shaped object from another star flying through our solar system with questionable orbital velocities (we are not quite sure how to explain a small acceleration it had). A cylinder/plate is not a low energy geometry (things like to turn into spherical type objects over time), it's from another solar system, we don't know very much about it. How could you not want to visit it?
It's an opportunity to pull off a speed and distance record, visit something from another solar system, resolve big research questions about its shape, composition, origin and rule out any theories of its possible intelligent origin. They are also pursuing it to showcase the benefits of nuclear heat for space.
There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out.
> That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is.
> The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that the ship would stay within that cone as it corrects for the motion of our Solar System (and its own) within our galaxy. Remember that this dimming effect has been observable for several decades.
Then again, aliens don't have any obligation to make sense to us.
Whipping it around a nearby unoccupied star would be an easy way to obscure its origins. Just their bad luck that Sol turned out to be occupied, by a primitive civilization that might be able to act on knowledge of its origin vector in a few centuries or millennia.
It looks slow to us, but it might be that whatever method it uses to skip big distances doesn't steer, so the only way to get pointed somewhere else is a close approach. And, of course, the method doesn't work in a gravity well, so it has to coast until it's a few hundred AU out.
Will enough records be preserved through the coming dark ages (after the ecosystem collapses) for the raccoons or macaques or whatever inherits the earth to act on them?
More like 10,000,000,000 years at least. The closest star is 4.26 light years away. At current speeds (~65000 km/h) it’ll take 40,767,123 years to reach. _IF_ it’s going in the right direction.
It’s doubtful they’ll even find the sun in its current phase
Well presumably anyone smart enough to mass produce interstellar probes would be able to make pretty decent sensors for a probe that's 100-1000 meters long (Oumuamua). Might even pick an asteroid that's long and thin and core it out and put a big telescope inside.
At least some speculation on Oumuamua lead to the conclusion that it had unusually low mass for an object so large.
Oumuamua might well have reported something interesting 1000 years ago when it was 0.09 light years away. Maybe changes in the atmospheric chemistry related to human activity.
Also note C/2019 Q4 is approaching at about 50% faster than the previous. It looks like it's a comet with a tail... or is that a retrorocket?
So why exactly can we not get a better look at it as it is leaving? With all our earth- and spacebound telescopes [1] (some are sitting at Earth-Sun Lagrange points) I would imagine we could. Being too far away behind the sun seems an unlikely argument to me.
We have no idea what is the orbit so the distance doesn't matter there is no way to do a flyby unless we know for sure it's there and can map it's orbit nearly fully otherwise regardless of how fast we are going we'll never get to it :)
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